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church-not even a temple of Pagan worship. would leave it to crumble. I would not destroy an Eikon; I would, on the contrary, preserve it carefully in a museum. The temper which would "utterly destroy" the idols is not admirable; better far to convince mankind that they are idols. Once that conviction is established, it would be useless to destroy them. In that which passes to-day for religion there are many idolatries, many superstitions. Bacon's category of idols-idols of the cave, idols of the tribe, idols of the market-place, and idols of the amphitheatre-by no exhausted the list. There are idols of the temple as well as of the cave and of the tribe. Superstition is no less superstition because of being associated with the purest of lives or the strictest of creeds. And superstitions there are, many and rampant, in almost every form of religion that calls itself "Christian" to-day. to-day. Let us not denounce those who in all sincerity cleave to them. Leave them alone. Their faith "through form is pure as thine." Let the fuller light of knowledge spread. Let the newer generations see that these things are but idols; that vain accretions have grown up about a core of truth. Be very sure that there is such a core. Leave them alone to crumble away. Let us not go about to destroy them by any active interference. Let us rather build up something truer, more noteworthy, more enduring.

The religion that is wanted in the world is not a replica of any of the religions in power to-day. What is wanted is a vitalising rule of life, that shall itself make for, and consist in right conduct; that shall itself build up and live in noble character: it

shall be in principle a true religio vitae, a matter of life, not of creed.

It has been well said that all good men are, at bottom, of the same religion. The saying is profoundly true; but it would be utterly false to assert that all good men are at bottom of the same creed. Even a very brief reflection will show that a man's religion which he lives may be a totally different thing from the creed which he professes. It may be such is the complexity of human nature-a totally different thing from the creed which he supposes himself to believe. The mistake of thinking that creed is religion, and that religion is creed, has ever worked the greatest spiritual mischief. It lit the fires of the Inquisition, it led to the murder of Papists by Elizabeth as well as to the murder of Protestants by Mary. It caused Calvin to burn Michael Servetus at Geneva. It made the Puritan Fathers of New England hang the Quaker martyrs. It is responsible for the massacre of Armenians by Turks, and for the butchery of Jews by Russians in our time. It is based on the inadmissible assumption-inadmissible in the light of modern thought -that the minds of men are so constituted that they can all think alike; whereas the truth is that their minds differ from one another as widely as do the shapes of their noses. At the risk of the

simile appearing grotesque it may be said that as the sense of smell depends upon the nose, but in no effectual way depends upon the shape of the nose, so a man's religious sense is bound up with his beliefs, but is independent of the particular shape of his beliefs. Two men of different mould may have quite different creeds, and yet each be truly religious.

It is a fact of the most ordinary occurrence, plain to observers in every walk of life.

At the base of any vital religion there lies the perception of a great fact of human consciousness, which however expressed-and it may be expressed in very varied terms-that man and his environment, though material and subject to the limitations of time and space, are not material only; that the material takes its place amidst, and is but part of, something supra-material, something that is not defined in space nor delimited by time. Man is a thinking animal; but he is not merely a thinking animal. He is possessed of yet another faculty beside that of reason; a something which is called a soul, or a spirit, or a conscience; something which brings to him the elemental conceptions of justice, mercy, love; something which not only enables him to distinguish more or less clearly between right and wrong, but which when he has done wrong touches him with a twinge of unhappiness or pain. Without stopping to inquire here whether this faculty be in reality more than a single one, or consist of several faculties, we must treat the fact of its existence as beyond dispute. It brings to a man consciousness of something which though invisible, intangible, immaterial, is greater than himself; something which he did not make, which he cannot destroy; a spiritual environment of which, though in one aspect it seems to be outside himself, he is himself a part. It is in the recognition of this elementary fact in human consciousness that religious thought begins. The possession of this consciousness is not confined to any one race or tribe of men, not to any one age. It is a

common property of the human race, however various the systems of religion which have grown up within it. Assuredly it is more highly developed in some men than in others, in some races than in others. But being thus shared amongst the human family it becomes an objective fact, a matter of evidence, not possible to be ignored or ruled out as a mere phantasy. But besides being thus shared by the whole race it is in a certain sense the special property of the individual. Whatever he may learn of the workings of the religious faculty in others, his knowledge of it at first hand, as it lives within himself, is to him a much more real and vital concern. Whatever evidence there may be from without, the conviction from within is, at any rate in most cases, far more potent. To feel pain or hunger or joy in one's self is a totally different thing in kind from merely observing or being told of the experience of those feelings by others. Had we not felt them ourselves, how could we realise what they were in others? A man comes to understand the religious instinct in others by its working within himself. The instinct of religion is then innate, as natural as the instinct of hunger, or of self-preservation, or of sex. Even in the most degraded and degenerate, the criminal lost to all sense of duty or honour, there still exist germs of the finer impulses; witness the code of honour amongst thieves, and the oft-recorded acts of selfrenunciation amongst the worst of criminals towards others of their own set.

We start, then, from the facts of experience, evidence, and conviction, that there exists an objective something, apart from ourselves but in

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which we ourselves somehow share, which though non-material and non-physical is yet as real as, nay at times more real than, the world of matter. constitutes a realm of human experience to be investigated; a subject for intellect to examine, in order that its facts may be explored, its laws discovered, its workings comprehended. The religious faculty is a something different from the intellect, and the truths perceived by it are not to be discovered by the intellect. Yet the intellectual faculty may be-nay, must be-applied to the things perceived by the religious faculty if they are to be rightly apprehended. An analogy will make this point clearer. A man may be in perfect possession of the reasoning faculties, trained in logic and mathematics and yet have no sense of smell. The perception of odours is attained by the use of a faculty different from these. But, given that faculty, then the perceptions which it brings to the individual would be of little service did he not bring his reason to bear upon them, and draw useful inferences by comparison of them. He might indeed, if himself devoid of the sense of smell, collect from the experience of others, with infinite effort, a large number of facts on which to generalise. A blind man might similarly learn the facts and deduce the laws of optics, might even train himself in a mechanical way to paint pictures. This is not,

however, the point. The point is that religious experiences in ourselves and in others, though acquired through the non-intellectual faculty of spiritual perception, are yet, if they are to be made fruitful, subject to being investigated and coordinated by the reasoning faculty. Man has no