is now a soul-resting and soul-trusting in a person. Does now the struggle, so graphically described by the apostle in the seventh of Romans as the conflict of the law of the members and the law of the mind, fall away? Certainly not, but the scene changes. The law of harmony has been discovered. The conflict is no longer a war of ideals. The soul is no longer combating the illusions of its own creation. The blind and purposeless strife is ended. The good has been defined. The motive is the self-appropriation of this good. The impulses which resist and cramp the soul are already reconciled in a Person who has reconciled the antagonism of spirit and nature unto himself. Now the warfare of the soul is the effort to realize the fruit of an accomplished victory. The antagonistic elements, both from within and without, are not to be destroyed but to be transformed. Conflict is the principle of self-development. Discord is the presupposition of realization. Hence, self-surrender is not the goal. It is but means to an end. It is the active and persistent recognition of an ideal—a City, a King, a developed spiritual self, without which development the City and King would be only illusions. For the reason, though clothed with the power of self-legislation, cannot will itself into a state of perfection. Self-determination is no unmeaning endowment. It must express itself in particular acts. It cannot proceed at once from the particular to the universal. It can advance only by particular volitions; but these imply opposition. The ideal and perfect self can only find itself through the antagonisms of a lower self, and by successive volitions to surrender the lower to the higher. Without this surrender there is no freedom, and no attainment is possible. A mere moral life fixes its eye upon a distant goal as the end of achievement, an end which vanishes farther and farther with every approach; and thus the victory of the higher over the lower self is never realized and never can be. Infinite additions do not make an infinite. Here if the moral ideal were actually reached it would be but the realization of a potential self; such a life could only mean crude and unrelieved antagonisms. I may live a life of absolute self-sacrifice and seek to identify myself with every true interest of family and state, and yet, as that interest itself is a progressive life, I, as one

of its members, have identified myself with a definite but not infinite quantity.

This, of course, is not the religious conception. Here the ideal is not reached by progressive steps. In the idea of religion as self-surrender to God, the Infinite Spirit is realized as the first term of the series. The native discord between soul and will vanishes with the first step in the divine life. The Infinite is no longer the inaccessible horizon. "God is a very present help.” The soul does not attain to some attribute of God by painful progression, and address itself to the hopeless task of rising ultimately to the consciousness of the Infinite Whole, but in the moment of self-surrender joins the children of faith in the acclaim, "now are we the sons of God." Still the question remains, are there no foes to fight, no differences to compose, no mistakes to cancel ? Can the life of faith be conceived otherwise than as a progression from grace to grace, from old to new obedience? Is not approximation the only way of advance? Here in answer to such questions we must confront a maze of apparent contradictions. The Christian paradoxes of Bacon set forth the conflict with striking significance. The writer of these paradoxes was at one time supposed to view them with a divided mind; but what was insuperable to the father of the Inductive Philosophy offers no difficulty to the spiritually-instructed child of faith. He understands that he must put on the whole armor, but he understands also that the victory has been won; there is antagonism, but there is also reconciliation-discord and yet harmony. The attainments of the believer, if viewed as successive increments in his spiritual life, preclude forever the Christian ideal. He could never conceive and could never realize it. As an infinite whole, he could never approach it nor participate in it. To conceive of religion as the hope of a prospective union with the divine mind is the complete negation of the idea. This union is the necessary pre-condition from the first of its reality and enjoyment. "We have the mind of Christ" was the assertion of the apostle when defining the subjective difference between the natural and spiritual man. As we cannot reach the infinite by successive additions to the finite, so we cannot reach the divine mind by adding to our attainments.

We do not become religious by super-imposing the divine intelligence upon our minds, but by making that intelligence our own. "Let that mind be in you which was in Christ Jesus" is not an external law foreign to our natures, but is the necessary condition of knowing anything beyond the veil of sense. Once within the sphere of the Infinite Spirit the true philosophy of growth is to appropriate what implicitly we have received. As the whole oak is potentially in the acorn, so the whole spiritual life is contained in form in the very rise of religion in the soul. It is not the development of the old nature with its false ideals, but the unfolding of the new life hid with Christ in God. The external evil and inward imperfection belong to the fleeting life of sense which has been renounced. Even these work together for good by exciting the soul to claim the whole of its birthright and to seek revenue from its entire inheritance. This life is by faith, and as it is a life divinely derived, it is divinely moved. As such it is an infinite and eternal whole.

II. The speculative view of faith must lead to the feeling of obligation, because faith cannot be conceived otherwise than as rational, and, as such, finds itself in rational acts. Self-surrender and renunciation of worldly ideals are not the all of a life of faith They are rather the preliminary and necessary volitions, and, as such, constitute the pre-conditions of such a life. Now, if faith is rational, its ground, as has already been pointed out, must be rational also. That is to say, the faith which determines the ground of obligation is in turn determined by it. This is a circle, but not a vicious circle. It is an ultimate psychological fact in the constitution of our nature. Its analogue is found in the autonomy of the will, where the will determines the law, and the law determines the will. Man is thus represented both as lawgiver and subject. Kant conceived this law as immanent in man, and was followed at this point by Fichte, who argued that "no law, no commandment, though divine, is unconditionally obligatory; it is obligatory only on condition that it is confirmed by our conscience, and only because our conscience does confirm it." This may be construed in the language of more modern ethics as the well-known postulate, that law, to be obligatory, must possess both

subjective validity and objective authority. In other words, the law as expressing the nature of the lawgiver must be immanent, while it is also recognized as transcendent. Now it is certainly true that such a faith rests both on a logical and a theistic basis. On the one hand, the law which is of faith is seen not as the arbitrary will of the lawmaker, but as the transcript of his own nature. On the other hand, obedience to the law is but the dictum of the subject's own conscience. The law written in the heart then becomes the logical unity in which all differences are harmonized. Human and divine interests no longer conflict. The same object is common to both. Satisfied that the law of the kingdom is the law to which his conscience bears witness, man sees that his rational life is a contribution to the establishment of that kingdom. While the subject sees the will of God as the unconditional principle of his life, he does not see it as an alien force. Rational acts then become voluntary acts. They are neither derogatory to God nor foreign to man.

There are two great dangers which lie in wait for the man who would do the will of God. In the early and mediæval church these errors took the names of mysticism and asceticism. They pass by other and different names in our day. They have a common origin. They took their departure from the supra-rational spirit. Cutting loose from the categories of Aristotle, they began to transform and to interpret the ideas of Plato. The sentimental, and not the rational, side of man's nature was cultivated. From mysticism came superstition; from asceticism came fanaticism. These twin evils plagued the church for many centuries. Their hideous and grotesque manifestations are not much seen in the highways of our civilization, but they survive plainly enough in the less sensational form of church institutions and dogmas. Inferences from Scripture which have no authority to bind the conscience are exalted to the high dignity of principles. Dogmas of the church are confounded with the dogmas of the Scriptures. Rational testimony is neglected or repudiated. Stillingfleet, in the seventeenth century, expressed the true doctrine—a doctrine which long before had been approved by the Reformers after they had rejected the text of Divina Fides in the settlement of

the canon of Scripture: "Where there is an infallible testimony, sufficient rational testimony goes along with it to make it evident that it came from God."

We must distinguish between the rational and rationalism, and we must remember also that a theoretical knowledge, which ends in philosophical skepticism, is not necessarily averse to religion. To show the limits of demonstrative knowledge is not to discredit faith. Thus, theistic arguments, though often exposing the Achilles heel, are of great benefit, not because they afford demonstration of the existence of God, but because they exercise the already existing feeling of his presence. Thus, also, Kant, while defining the limits of theoretical knowledge, and despairing of a valid argument for the divine existence, affirmed, "It is indeed necessary to be convinced of the existence of God, but it is not equally necessary to demonstrate it." He expressed his willingness to destroy the harmony of his dialectic rather than sacrifice faith. His three ideals, God, freedom, and immortality, could be established by means of postulates in the practical reason as distinguished from the theoretical, and thus he invoked a divine reason as a rational necessity to account for reason itself.

It may be objected that sin has so deformed our reason that it is no longer competent to test the truth, and, consequently, that no object of faith can be reliably determined; but this objection is self-contradictory, for, if it is true, how does the objector know it to be true? And how is it that he has faith in his own objection?

In conclusion, it is evident that the reflective reason can have no purpose, no end, if it is not to give unity to itself and to objects of its knowledge; but this is impossible apart from the fact of God. If reason regards itself as alone in the world, or as the only absolute, it must come back at last from its weary wanderings with the melancholy confession of Hume-the last word of skepticism, and a monumental warning to all who would travel his way: "I have already shown," said he, "that the understanding, when it acts according to its most general principles, entirely subverts

1 Stillingfleet, Origines Sacra, Vol. II., p. 8.