So much for the phenomena; the exact scientific description we may leave to psychology; it is the psychologists who have to decide how much therein is physical and how much psychical, and how much, perhaps, spiritual. For us, the important point is that personality exerts a real influence, an influence exerted by nothing else known to us. I cannot be what I am without affecting others to a greater or less degree. The only question is, what makes that degree greater or less? What do we mean by calling some personalities strong and others weak? Why do some persons affect me more than others? And why do other people feel the force of personal influence differently from myself? The answer is not so hard as it seems; strength of personality, as Illingworth has pointed out, is proportionate to the number of points of contact between the active personality and the passive. A man may have a strong effect on me, who has no effect at all on my neighbour. A strong personality, in the absolute sense, has points of contact that enable him to affect and "invade" the majority of men he meets. Personality, in fact, is not exclusive but inclusive. We are persons, that is to say, not by our power of self-isolation, but by our power of transcending that isolation and linking ourselves to others, and others to ourselves. The doctrine of the familiar lines,

"Each in his separate sphere of joy or pain
Our hermit-spirits live and move alone,"

is for most of us unfortunately too true; but the more we possess of the great gift of personality, so much the more are we able to escape from the solitude of our hermit-cells, austere or self-indulgent, and join in a life which relates us to other lives, with common joys,

common aims, and common experiences. Caliban was not a person; Prospero was; and even Trinculo, to the non-personal Caliban, was a kind of god.

This power of affecting others, then, to a greater or less degree, is a matter of experience; and its main condition is affinity. In each part of my mental being, will, intellect, and emotion, I must be able to "get at" the mental being of others. Of the three, the readiest vehicle for this invading power is emotion. The electric current will fuse where the hammer would break or crush; the strongest will becomes doubly strong when suffused with rich and eager feeling. All the great leaders, of nations as well as of religions, have been men of strong passions; Pitt as much as Gladstone, Calvin as much as Luther, Mohammed as much

as Paul. The greater the whole personality, the deeper the emotions the stronger is the influence, the "invasion," the self-communication.

II. Let us now return to our previous conclusion, that personal reconciliation involves the suffering of the wronged. We have already seen that in reconciliation between two persons, something more than reconciliation is necessary. Reconciliation is the healing of a wrong attitude to an individual; but I cannot place myself in a wrong attitude or a wrong relation to an individual, without placing myself in an equally wrong relation to the humanity of which that individual is a part; and if I would set myself right with the individual, I must set myself right with humanity; I must acknowledge my sin, not only against the command that forbids me to tell a lie or act unkindly to Thomas or John, but against the command that forbids me to do so to men in general. But, if our argument in chapter iii. was right, we

cannot stop even here. We think of something more than Thomas or John; but that something more is not humanity; it is a Person standing behind or manifested through humanity. It is not formal duty, but personal will, which stands over us in the moment of our repentance. Against Thee, Thee only, have I sinned, and done this evil in Thy sight." This is the instinctive conviction of all religion and even of all morality; though he has outraged Bathsheba and murdered Uriah, it is before God alone that David trembles. Otherwise, the conception of a moral God could hardly have arisen. Unless God were interested

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in my conduct to my neighbour, religion could be nothing more than ritual. What could suggest this interest taken by God in my conduct to men, except the conviction that my conduct to men is part of my conduct to God? It may of course be urged that mankind has been under a "strong delusion," and that this conviction, if it exists, does not prove that there is any such thing as God at all. We can at this point only reply that if, as we are forced to believe, every system of ethics implies the existence of God, reconciliation implies reconciliation to God. It may be that we can form no clear idea of this God, whether as "Jehovah, Jove, or Lord"; we may be unable to rest in the conception of either Mohammedan, Platonist, or Christian; but the fact remains that behind our duties to persons there is our duty to a Person, dim or even invisible, from the notion of whom we cannot shake ourselves free.

The question of reconciliation thus becomes far more difficult than at first sight appeared. Reconciliation, to be complete, cannot be effected without the 1 Ps. 514.

aid of mediation, even though the person of the mediator be contained in the injured party himself. The true type of reconciliation is reconciliation by mediation; and when it is with God that we need a reconciliation, the further difficulty arises; by what mediation can we approach the unapproachable, or gain access to an offended Majesty, from whose very presence we are interdicted by the limits of our existence? Or, since reconciliation must, at least in most cases, start from the side of the wronged, how is God to approach us? This is the problem that has always confronted Deism of every shade. And Deism, unable to find a solution, becomes a more hopeless creed than Atheism itself. For if my sins are sins against God, and with God no true reconciliation is possible, it would be better for me if there were no God at all. The Christian claims that he has the solution; he asserts that there is not only a chasm to be bridged-which every one must admit-but that it has been bridged, and that the bridge remains, that it may be crossed yesterday, to-day, and for ever, by the divine feet.

How then has the abyss been spanned? Let us again try the method of analogy. For any reconciliation, A, the injured, and B, the injurer, must touch one another. Circumstances, even in human affairs, may render impossible a direct rapprochement between the two. This difficulty is often prominent when the need for reconciliation is specially felt by outsiders. In a great labour dispute, or in strained diplomatic relations between two countries, many others will suffer besides the parties immediately concerned; and the obvious. expedient has always been that some third party, if possible a persona grata with both the disputants, should use his good offices as mediator, or should come

forward, as one who comprehends the wrong inflicted by B upon A, the possible provocation felt by B, and the extent of the resulting estrangement in the minds of both; and thus be able to represent A to B, and B to A. Even if one of the parties should be anxious to find a way of reconciliation, the conciliator may still be necessary; and where Elisha remains in his house, and Naaman is going away in a rage, Naaman's servants, by showing their master the other side of the case, and saying to him what Elisha himself might have said, by "representing" Elisha to him, when he would not have been likely to listen to Elisha in person, can bring the quarrel to an end.

But these instances only take us along a small part of the way that we have to traverse. Most welldisposed persons have earned something of the blessing of the peacemaker, and have spent some time, as George Herbert's "Country Parson" spent his spare hours on Sundays, in "reconciling neighbours that are at variance," and have induced each to see the other's position by taking each position themselves in turn. But we are not now dealing with a simple quarrel, where both parties have an equal right to feel offence; we have to consider the case in which one party has done the wrong and the other has suffered it; and where the injured, wishing to recall the injurer to himself, is yet separated by a gulf which he cannot

cross.

III. We may be forgiven if we use a more lengthy illustration to serve our purpose. Let us imagine a father who is anxious to set up his son in business, and with that object makes over to him a part of his estates situated in a foreign country, and sends him abroad to supervise them. But the son proves no faithful steward