faith and into living worship is the recovery or discovery of a spiritual conception of the universe. The way out is not by an attack on science or by a revolt from it, but by seeing that the real world in which we live is vastly more than the mechanism of matter and motion that submits to science. The real world is essentially organic with mind and mind with it, completing itself in man and revealing its significance through him. The only world we know concretely is this rich world of life and purpose and beauty and truth which is always a mutual fit with our minds and through the inter-relation of which both are revealed. There is thus no world sundered from mind and there is no mind that is not bound up with a world in the heart of which our consciousness is set. Well, this mind of ours with its inherent relations to the universe of nature, with its creative appreciation of beauty, sublimity and purpose, with its capacity to transcend the factual, and to live for what ought to be, with its sense of imperfection and its intimations of eternity, is not the abstract psyche which we study in psychology — i. e., a mere collection of states. Each finite self always involves and manifests an immanent principle which transcends the finite. We are plainly overfinite as we are over-individual. We each pre

sent a unique focalization of a spiritual world, and something of the larger whole is revealed in the individual part, but full divine reality is adequately revealed only in the complete organic whole. "The open secret of the universe," as Professor Pringle-Pattison has recently said, "is a God who lives in the perpetual giving of himself, who shares the life of his finite creatures, bearing in and with them the whole burden of their finitude, their sinful wanderings and sorrows and the suffering without which they cannot be made perfect." In our highest moments we feel the significance of the whole organic reality, and we come into some sort of contact-relation with the Spirit of the whole, and we feel then as a child lost in a crowd feels when it finds its father. til we have fathomed the deeps of the soul, then, have tracked its origin to this evolving dust-wreath of matter, have "proved" that it is only an empirical aggregation of states, with no power on its own acts or on the world and possessed of no inner way to God, we may well go on worshiping and drawing upon sources of spiritual life.

Un

IT is a favorite idea of the author of the Fourth Gospel and the first epistle of John that one does not come into full possession of himself nor participate in an adequate way in the life of the kingdom of God until he has been "twice born." In the famous Nicodemus passage (John III. 3), which has figured more prominently in theology than almost any other passage ever written, the essential word is extremely difficult to translate. It is avalev, which may mean again," " anew," or it may mean "from above." The context would imply the meaning to be "again" or anew," but throughout the first epistle by the same author the recurrent phrase is "born of God," i. e., born from above the natural order. In John I. 13 "the children of God" are de

scribed as persons who are "born not of blood nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of men, but of God," i. e., they are not merely natural, empirical beings, they participate in a higher order of life; they are born from above. This writer, in every part of his interpretation of spiritual, or eternal life, takes it as settled that something from beyond the man himself, as an addition of grace, must come or be "received," before one can attain the type and quality of life which Christ has inaugurated.

It is plain, without the suggestion of any theological theory, that the bundle of egoistical instincts and passions with which the once-born child is furnished when he arrives does not "fit" him for the kingdom of God, if the kingdom is to be thought of as a coöperative social group-life, of mutual interrelated service, whose spring and motive and power are love. That kind of world is not built out of beings who live by self-seeking, or self-regarding, impulses. From somewhere something "new must come into play, something higher" than ego-forces must emerge, if a kingdom" is ever even to dawn. We must admit that something higher than these self-regarding impulses does "emerge in the growing child. He begins at an early date in his unfolding

life-long before he is consciously religious to reveal a capacity for love and to show signs of self-forgetfulness, of restraint and sacrifice, and of love, at least en crépuscule. And as life goes on unfolding in relationship with others, the signs of "other-regarding" interests and sympathies multiply. There is an immense amount of unselfishness in this human world of ours; and with all its evils, its positive sin, and its depravity, there is much that is sublime and glorified with love and tenderness. Where do these "higher "traits come from? Are they natural" or are they "from above" and "of God"?

In asking this question in that form of hard and fast dilemma, we are making the answer to it more difficult than we need to make it. This is one of those situations in which instead of choosing" either -or," we may take "both." There is surely something."natural" about the highest spiritual life and there is also something transcendent about it, something" from above," something "of God," something which is most properly called "grace." First let us consider the natural aspect. In the synoptic gospels Christ with the utmost simplicity speaks of the life of the kingdom as though it were as natural as breathing. He calls his followers to live free, easy, natural,