Universal Geometrician, Whose divine compass has measured all things. I prefer that as explanation of the logarithmic curve of the nautilus and the garden spiders, to the worm screwing up the tip of its tail.

As to being gentle with the rising generation . the Bible that was good enough for me in the darkest hour of my life, they in their hour of need will find equally good. God has spoken, and He asks to be believed.

I would close in the words of our late learned President, the Earl of Halsbury: "I don't like the modern criticism," said Lord Halsbury, "and I will not admit to being influenced by it in the least. To me the Bible is inspired, and if I believed anything else, I should die a miserable man."

Miss MAYNARD, in reply, said: The reception of my paper has been very kind.

The imprecatory Psalms have been mentioned, but not, I think, explained. There are two lessons our Divine Creator sets before man to learn-to hate sin, and to love the sinner. In dealing with immaturity, which would be taught first? To a young child, to love means both to caress and to imitate, and this is very unsafe. The wise plan is to begin with the hatred of sin and get that firmly established, and this to an immature mind means condemnation of the man who sins. That is a phase which cannot be helped. Only Christ can fully separate between man and sin, which He makes as clear as the separation between man and disease. Then comes in the reign of the Gospel, with the preaching of unending, unwearied love toward the sinner. In the imprecatory Psalms you see half the lesson being well learned. The hatred of sin is complete, the love to the sinner is still hidden in the future.

The question of pseudonymity was touched upon, and it was argued that it is not in human nature to give away magnificent productions of the spirit and the pen, and sign them with another man's name. This was adduced to cover the authorship of Deuteronomy, Isaiah, from the 40th chapter onward, and the majority of the Psalms. Now it may seem strange, but this was not the feeling of antiquity, and authors delighted in signing their work by the name of the great master they were following. I believe there are more than twenty spurious Dialogues of Plato," borrowing the names of the speakers and all else, and the treatises signed Galen may be counted by the hundred. This surely may

explain in part at least the authorship of the Pentateuch.

It was brought forward that our Lord during His Temptation quoted no other book but Deuteronomy, and that this was a guarantee of its Inspiration. Most certainly it is, but that does not include the date. There it stands, a part of our Bible for ever, a beautiful

tender, gentle restatement of the Laws of Sinai, in the terms of expostulation and entreaty, sent through some unknown prophet of Israel, when the early childhood of our race was over, and adolescence that can be reasoned with had taken its place.

It was well remarked by Mr. Roberts and by others as well, that scientific discoveries (whether eventually proved right or wrong),‹ and questions of authorship and date such as the origin of the Pentateuch, are not the foundation of the Faith we hold. I believe with Mr. Gillespie that before the critic can be of any help in the personal salvation of man, he must himself be a partaker of the spiritual life, new born within. And yet, admitting these matters to the full, I still think it desirable that the older and more experienced minds should study the verdicts of criticism, and not leave them wholly to the judgment of the young and crude minds around us. The tide of secular thought and discovery is mounting, and cannot possibly be checked, and we must meet it with understanding and not with blank hostility. We are quite safe, we are on the winning side. The confession of Christ as God is the rock on which the whole Church is built, and we have the promise that the gates of hell shall never prevail against it.

637th ORDINARY GENERAL MEETING,

HELD IN THE CONFERENCE HALL,

THE CENTRAL HALL, WESTMINSTER, S.W., on Monday, January 23rd, 1922, at 4.30 p.m.

ALFRED T. SCHOFIELD, Esq., M.D., in the Chair.

The Minutes of the previous Meeting were read, confirmed and signed and the HON. SECRETARY announced the election of the following Associates: The Rev. Wilfred H. Isaacs, M.A., F. J. Moon, Esq., Mrs. W. G. Martley, Vincent C. H. Millard, Esq., M.A., Miss Mildred Duff, and Mrs. Agnes S. Whipple.

The Chairman then called on Mr. Sydney T. Klein, F.L.S., F.R.A.S., to read his paper on "The Invisible is the Real, the Visible is only its Shadow." The lecture was illustrated by physical experiments.

66

THE INVISIBLE IS THE REAL, THE VISIBLE IS ONLY ITS SHADOW." Illustrated by physical experiments. By Sydney T. Klein, F.L.S., F.R.A.Š., F.R.M.S., &c.

N other words, the Spiritual is the Real, the physical is only its shadow-form, as depicted on our finite organs of perception.

Let us firstly clearly understand what we mean by Real and Unreal.

To most people the world in which we live seems very real and it is difficult for them to believe otherwise; but the longer we investigate and the more knowledge we thereby gain of our surroundings, the clearer we see that behind all phenomena there is a wonderful incomprehensible power which we call the Spiritual, and that that power is quite beyond our senses of perception and therefore of our conception, except in its effects, namely, those appearances which in detail we call phenomena and in the aggregate we call the Universe.

In whatever direction we pursue our investigation we indeed find that ultimately it is always the Unknowable which is the cause of the Knowable; the Invisible the cause of the Visible. On the other hand those who have not investigated or looked beyond the horizon of everyday life and who insist that the Visible is real because they live and move and have their being therein, can only look upon the Invisible as shadowy and unreal. But a little thought shows this conclusion to be quite untenable, because if the Invisible is unreal and the Visible real it would make the unreal actually the cause of the real, which is, of

course, absurd. We have therefore to acknowledge that the Invisible is real and is the cause of the Visible which we call the universe, and it remains for us to see whether the Visible is also real.

I

I propose to lay before you certain facts to show that though we have become accustomed to accept the reality of our surroundings and have thus concluded that there are two worlds, the Invisible and the Visible, in reality there is only one world. shall show that the Visible, namely, the world of our everyday life, or what I will call the world of appearances, is only real in the sense that dolls, wooden horses and toys may be said to be real to children; they are useful for their education, but are really only make-believes to help their infant minds to expand and grasp higher truths.

The human race is steadily progressing towards the goal to which the scheme of creation is carrying us; but it is yet in its infancy as shown by the fact that we still require symbolism to help us to maintain and carry forward abstract thoughts to higher levels, even as children require picture books for that purpose. It is well therefore that we commence our investigation in a humble frame of mind, namely, that we first clearly realise our ignorance and the limitations under which only are we able to look out upon our surroundings.

Let us first consider how much many of us are dominated by this world of appearances in our everyday life.

We are each living in a little world created and furnished by our thoughts. The racing man lives in a world furnished with all the paraphernalia of horses, stables and jockeys, with a long list of future racing engagements and preparations for winning races years in advance. The business man is in touch with other business men in all parts of the earth, and is living in a world dominated by thoughts of transactions and financial calculations for present and future money-making. A member of the Stock Exchange is living in a turmoil of thoughts of stocks and shares and their probable value from day to day. The gambler is in a whirl of thoughts of possible luck in his world. of chance. A market gardener is planning from year's end to year's end how he can most profitably bring his produce to perfection and how, even in the winter months by means of glass-houses, he can grow fruit and vegetables which nature. would only produce during the summer. The physicist is living in a world of atoms, radio-activity, chemical analyses and synthesis, and the tremendous forces of nature which he can let loose and control; he is so engrossed in his experimental research and calculations that he can hardly allow himself the necessary time for sleep. Others are striving for worldly possessions, larger estates, and other means by which they can appear great

to the world; and alas! many others are struggling for a mere pittance for their daily bread. All in different ways are living in a world of physical domination created by their thoughts in this world of appearances. They are worshipping the fetish of the visible, as though it were the real, and if at times they are urged to think of the Invisible, the wonderful true meaning of our life here, they cannot find time for its consideration and put it off till to-morrow--which never comes.

It was this obsession which made the last war possible. For many years before the final cataclysm in 1914, the human race in almost every country was steadily raising up and worshipping the fetish of outward material power and ignoring the real inner 'spiritual life to which the scheme of creation is carrying us.

This obsession was more in evidence in Germany than in any other country. The value of the Invisible was ignored and with it went all reverence for religious and ethical ideals. Pride of Intellect supplanted spiritual discernment with the result that all thoughts and actions became wholly governed by the desire for self-aggrandisement. Ruthless ambition for mastery was taught in their schools as the true aim of life, and was openly advocated by their politicians, irrespective of the rights of weaker nations, culminating in the audacious dream of "Germany above all," with Berlin as the centre of a world-wide domination. The war has been a terrible lesson, but the shock has brought the human race to the point of awakening to a new and better aspect of life. It may even be realised that that shock has been a blessing in disguise, and that without it an even greater upheaval later on would have been necessary to have the same effect.

We will now examine this world of appearance and try to realise how very limited is the outlook we can employ for understanding our surroundings. Let us first examine our sense organs through which, only, can we get knowledge of that outside world. It is only comparatively lately that by the study of embryology we have discovered that all our sense organs have been developed from the same source, namely, from the outside skin. In the embryo of every animal we see that the first vestige of the advent of each sense organ is a wrinkle or enfoldment of the external skin, and from this common beginning are, in due course, developed the organs by means of which we become aware of our surroundings.

These organs are all formed on the same plan, namely, for the detection of vibrations or movements in the æther, air or matter, and they are each endowed with bundles of nerves or nerve processes which can be affected sympathetically by the particular pitch of vibrations which that organ is meant to receive. Each organ is therefore limited to a certain range of perception, and though in the last fifty years we have invented instruments to