seeming varieties can pass into one another. Light may become heat, heat may become light; either may become electricity. The vital force is not different from light, or heat, or electricity; it is only another form of the one central and incomprehensible force. There is no more difficulty in light, or heat, or electricity passing into life than there is in light, or heat, or electricity passing into one another; all are parts of a common unity-all are in essence already one. To see the origin of life, we must. observe the action of the material forces. These forces, by setting matter in motion, by combining and re-combining, by rending old forms and constructing new, by regulating the principles of attraction and repulsion between the atoms and molecules which compose the universe, at last wrought out an organism fit to live, and a world fit to support life. The rest was easy. Life -in its essence already one with the material forces-assumed its present aspect when it received its present embodiment, and in the meeting of the powers of nature in one organic form there was laid the foundation of that living germ which has itself been the origin of man.

Now, let us suppose for a moment that all this were conceded. Let us say that the forces of nature without any other aid have formed the outward organism. Let us say that, without any prevision or intelligence, the organism has been fitted to its environment. Let us even say that in the completed organism life has arisen naturally as one of the forms of light, and heat, and electricity. We shall then have only touched the shore of that sea which no ship has ever essayed to traverse. When we have disposed of the phenomenon of life, our troubles are only beginning, for it is then we have to encounter the mystery of all mysteries-the phenomenon of consciousness. It is the sense of the changeless in the mutable. In the existence of every man who watches the transmutations of his bodily form, the averment is literally true, that in the midst of life we are in death. The organism in which we were born is not the organism in which we now dwell. Not one atom is left of that material structure which was by supposition the origin of our consciousness. The elements have all passed away, and made room for other elements -we have been unclothed and clothed upon anew. Yet through

all this material transition-this flux and reflux-this vanishing of the old and replacement by the new-man's sense of identity never wavers. The component parts of his old body-the component forces of his old physical nature-have been dissipated into new combinations; but his consciousness, that evidence of a changeless life, is unbroken still. We might say of it, in adaptation of the words of an ancient poet, 'They perish, but thou remainest; they all shall wax old as a garment, but thou art the same.' If it be so, the question lies on the very surface, and it is this, Can that whose nature it is to be changeless be the result of that whose essence is mutability? Can that which only exists in the act of passing away be the parent of that whose very definition is continuity? If it can, on what evidence are we to believe it? Shall we appeal to the facts of present experience? These, by the admission of science herself, are all adverse to the belief. No man of the present day would admit for a moment the natural possibility of a resurrection from the dead-that is to say, no man of the present day would admit the possibility that a union of the old material forces might bring back to him. the lost object of his love. Why is this? If material forces once originated this conscious personality, why do not bereaved men lift up their heads in the hope that they may originate it. again? It is because they and all men know that, if the forces of nature ever had such a power, it must have been before the birth of human experience. It is the received doctrine of science that in all the ages of history no life has been produced except by life. On what evidence are we to believe that in the age preceding history the power to create life existed in matter? There can only be one evidence for such a view-the testimony of faith; to this issue again we come. He who believes that material nature once possessed a power which she does not now possess, believes that material nature was herself once supernatural. He appeals from science to a state of things of which science knows nothing-from the order of experience to an order that transcends experience-from the laws of the existing universe to the laws of an universe which eye hath not seen and which heart has not conceived. We do not say whether in such a sphere such

an appeal is or is not legitimate; that is a question to be settled by the apologist alone. But the point on which we insist is, that, whether true or false, right or wrong, it is an appeal to the supernatural. It is a confession that the laws of the material universe cannot account for their own origin, and an effort to find their origin in the supposition of laws which at first were supernatural.

Let us now see where we stand in this inquiry. If the foregoing observations be just-and we do not see how they can be controverted-there will follow a very important inference: that we do not need a supernatural faculty to give us a knowledge of the supernatural. The Gnostic took it for granted that, without such a faculty, an evidence of the supernatural was impossible; and the Agnostic, in all other respects his opponent, is in this at one with him. In the view of both alike, we can only perceive a life beyond nature by getting ourselves outside the limits of nature. But, if the view we have taken be a true one, it is the sense of a limit itself which gives the idea of the supernatural. If we have rightly interpreted the most ordinary facts of human nature, our conception of a law transcending the present law is derived from the very limitations of our being. It is not the product of moments of ecstacy in which the human soul fancies it has emancipated itself from the trammels of earthly things. It is, on the contrary, the result of these trammels. It comes from the consciousness that we are not free-that we are hemmed in by barriers on every side-that we are obstructed by boundaries which we cannot pass. No doubt, the very desire to pass them implies the existence in man of something transcendental, but that something is not a faculty of the soul-it is the soul itself. In the very act of recognising the limits of nature, man proves himself to be larger than those limits. The moment I have recognised that a barred gate is barred, I have already in thought seen beyond it, for the very conception of a bar is the notion of something which protects the other side. To know that I do not know is already some point of knowledge. The sense of ignorance is the first stage of ignorance dispelled. When a man says he does not know the charm of music, he admits the existence of the unknown charm; he learns it by seeing

a limit which is to him impassable, but over which others can leap. Here is a positive fact wrapped up in a seemingly negative statement. If you doubt it, you have only to consider what the pure negation would have been. If all men from the beginning had been destitute of the sense of music, no man would have known his ignorance of that sense, for no man would have conceived the possibility of its existence. There would be the want of a sense of limit; the gate and the bar would alike be inconceivable. This would be ignorance proper-ignorance unconscious of itself. But when a man says he has no ear for music, the case is very different; it is no longer an absolute ignorance, it is a positive knowledge of ignorance-in other words, a knowledge that there is something to be known. It is the conviction that there is in the world a thought which he himself does not possess, and a power to reach that thought which does not exist in him. This is ignorance, if you will, but it is not the ignorance of the man born blind; it is the ignorance of the man who has got sufficient light to know that he does not see. It is precisely this amount of light which leads man in nature; he sees darkness over all the problems of his own existence. He asks, Whence is this sense of mystery? If the laws of matter have made him, there ought to be no mystery about it; the principle of casuality in nature should be able at once to explain his origin. But nature can explain nothing. No beginning can be suggested without seeming to violate her laws; no denial of a beginning can be thought of without contradicting her leading principles. Turn where he will, he finds in himself something larger than the things around him-something capable of containing them, and therefore incapable of being contained by them. He sees in the forms and forces of matter no power that can explain his power-no life adequate to account for his life. His ignorance of himself comes from his very study of nature. His sense of mystery is not the survival of an age of unscientific culture; it is the direct and immediate result of the culture of science. It is because the laws of nature have been rigidly defined that he is able to mark their boundaries, and it is because he knows their boundaries that he finds himself to be more than

they. His knowledge of the limits of nature has forced him into faith in the supernatural.

We arrive then at this conclusion: If it should be found that there is in the human soul no transcendental faculty such as the Gnostic claims-if it should be found that, as the Agnostic holds, we are hemmed in on every side by the limits of our experience— it would not by any means follow that we have no ground for religious belief, for it is just in the sense of these limits that our evidence of the supernatural is seen. It is just by arriving at a knowledge of those chains that bind us that we learn the irrepressible desire to break through the chains, and read in that desire the proof that we are higher than our environment. It is from experience, and not outside experience, that man has derived his knowledge of an invisible world; the powers that have taught him to look beyond himself are the normal powers of his own soul. And we cannot but remark how much more satisfactory is this revelation than the transcendental revelation of the Gnostics. What was it that the men of the second century professed to have reached by their transcendental faculty? A life outside of time? What kind of life was this? It was blank negation! It was the absence of form-the absence of colour-the absence of personality the absence of thought itself! The faculty which transcended experience had no right to reveal the things of experience; it was bound to seek the Infinite, and to seek the Infinite was to seek the void. To transcend my experience is to transcend myself, and to transcend myself is to be annihilated. Such was the goal of Gnosticism. Had it been reached, it would have been to him who attained it the death of worship as of life itself. The Infinite as such cannot be the object of our religious reverence. The Infinite is the boundless, and the boundless cannot be figured by any soul; to think it would be to destroy it.

But, when I turn from these barren abstractions to that life of nature in which we live and move, I find a basis for religion at once more certain and more clear. I am no longer called to go out of myself in order to discover a presence which men name the Infinite. I reach something less than the Infinite, but more commensurate with my own nature-the supernatural. And I reach it, not by rising out of self, but by the very study of self. I