conspicuously not there. Yet he feels in a vague instinctive way that, unless the old books are all lies, Jesus Christ did somehow manage to convince the men of His time-and the conviction wrought in Peter and in Paul and made them what they werethat there was an ideal of human life not impossible to be striven for; that there was a possibility of the glory of the divine life entering into and ennobling a human soul; that God would indeed in some sense dwell with men upon the earth even though the Heaven of Heavens could not contain Him.

What the earnest seeker after truth desires to find is some not-unreasonable presentation of this psychological entity, dimly grasped by the primitive consciousness of man, this Most High to whom the human soul can cry in the hour of need, this Eternal and Immortal whose children all men are. He seeks to know more, if more can be known within the power of words to express, of the relation of Jesus Christ to the rest of mankind, and to learn how and in what way the coming of Jesus Christ was a manifestation of the divine. He wants to discover, thinks indeed that there may be some clue to it in the life-story of Jesus Christ, a pattern, which can be put up before the soul, of a true life. He longs for some influence, some intense conviction, that shall raise him out of his dull self into a higher plane of thought and feeling such as in his few moments of occasional spiritual exaltation he has felt to be possible. Can it be that it is possible in any continuous or permanent way to live on that higher plane, where the motives are purified, where the vision is made keen, where the heart becomes more sympathetic?

What he is seeking is that not-impossible Christianity which the Churches and the Churchmen have done their utmost to destroy; that religion, not impossible to men of thought, knowledge, and reverence, which noble and elevating as it may be even in those who admit no Christ into it, becomes not merely noble and elevating, but fruitful and progressive in those who have found in the selfsacrificing example of Jesus Christ the motive and mainspring to all that makes for good in their own lives.

Some there are who cannot yet go so far on the road, who are earnest seekers after truth and are neither religionists nor non-religionists, and yet are not indifferent. Some who while they admit the existence as a true objective entity of the spiritual immanence, non-material, non-physical, in which we live and move and have our being, are not able to conceive it as possessing the attributes of life or selfconsciousness, or consequently of personality. To such therefore, by whatever name they call it--the First Cause, or the Absolute-it does not appeal as a Person. But because they are to this extent atheistic, it by no means follows that they are irreligious or to be set down in vulgar phrase as Atheists; impersonal theists would indeed better describe their attitude, if indeed it were desirable to label them by a name. For such, and they are not few, though the attitude is one of unstable equilibrium which many do not long maintain, the writer has the sincerest sympathy. Having himself at moments passed through this stage of religious thought, he realises how far this reverent and deeply religious refusal of assent to a "personality" which

is undemonstrable by intellectual processes, but equally incapable of being disproved by them, is itself due to the forced meanings put upon the term "person" by the dogmatic theologians. The reward of their dogmatism is the estrangement from the following of Christ of some of the purest and noblest of souls. A forced orthodoxy which has resulted in a "Christianity " impossible of acceptance by the man of thought and knowledge who would be true to himself and to the noblest that he finds within him, has much to answer for. Men talk of the present day as a time of irreligion and of empty churches. Yes, and the answer is not far to seek : in their zeal for orthodoxy the Churchmen have slain their Christ.

At the outset reference was made to the circumstance that while the possession of the religious consciousness is common to men generally, it is also peculiarly the possession of the individual soul. If one were to base a constructive scheme of religion upon the general religious experience of mankind, one would run the risk of ignoring that more potent factor as a motive of right doing, the religious experience of the individual soul. If, on the other hand, one were to found such a scheme upon individual experience, since individual experience differs widely, one would run the risk of building no coherent structure at all; besides which there enters in, the inherent difficulty of transcendentalism. Much might be written, and indeed much has been written, on the nature and value of religious experience amongst men. Is it universal? Of what real value is it as a basis of religion? To what does it witness? How far are its results

subject to criticism? All these are questions which might well command attention. Granting, however, the main facts (1) that the religious faculty exists widely, if not universally; (2) that this faculty does bring what are known as religious experiences to the individual; (3) that the law by which the growth of this faculty in the individual can be cultivated is known (of which more hereafter), then it at once follows that if any individual by right cultivation of this faculty trains it to greater insight than the majority of his fellows, his experiences (though they may be different from those of his fellows in being more frequent or more deep, or more wide) will not, if they are true experiences and not fictions of the imagination, run counter to the general body of religious experience; and even if in extreme cases they seem novel, yet they will be found to be a true development from the generality of religious experience. One cannot well see how in any other way a constructive scheme can be framed, which will admit of religion being based at once on the collective religious experience of the many and yet also upon the personal experience of the individual.

But if thus a due place is admitted for the personal religious experience of the individual, with its enormous influence upon him as a religion at first-hand, not learned second-hand from any other human creature, it must be self-evident that with the diversity of soul that exists between man and man, the spiritual perceptions of men must necessarily be widely divergent. The more intense and real the personal conviction of the inner light that has come into the soul, the more fatal the attempt

of mere organisers or organisations to force religious thought into set grooves. Into set grooves it persistently refuses to be forced. The wind bloweth where it listeth, and the deep things of a man knoweth no man save the spirit of man that is in him. The inner conviction manifests itself in the man's actions, in his converse amongst men, in the quality of his citizenship, in his social relations. His life is ruled day by day and hour by hour by an unseen spiritual power. His life is his religion, whatever the particular language of his creed. Creed is not religion, orthodoxy is not religion, attendance at church is not religion. Religion is the life of God within the soul, directing and controlling conduct. It may lead some men to think out for themselves a definite creed-different creeds for different men. It may lead some to regular religious observances, day by day or week by week, of public worship; different observances for different men. But neither the subscription to a creed, nor the observance of public worship is in itself a religio vitae, and both are, alas! compatible with utter indifference to the needs of the poor and the sick, with indifference to the obligations of social and moral order, with hideous moral corruption, and even with crime.

It is a false antithesis to put orthodoxy against heterodoxy. Orthodoxy being a system of religious doctrines, hammered out in the semi-political strifes of the first six centuries amid the bickerings of the ecclesiastics in their Councils, the true antithesis, as any Greek scholar will know, is pseudodoxy; for if orthodoxy means correct belief (according to the Councils of the fourth century) then any other doxa must be incorrect or false if judged by that