drawn they are assumed to be coextensive with the data of fact furnished by experience. If we think of these questions only as forms of teaching and do not seek to obtain a near view of the experiences they represent, we are contenting ourselves with the poorest and least satisfying aspect of the truth involved. The factaspect is by far the more important and attractive. Psychology does not use the language of our theological systems in its descriptions and explanations of religious experience. These symbols go beyond the actual facts of consciousness and the immediate antecedents and conditions and give a philosophy of these facts. For example, psychology will report the constituent factors of the act of faith; theology will go farther, and affirm that God is the author of faith and that faith procures for its possessor acceptance in God's sight. These are truths, but truths of another science than that of psychology. Christian theology asserts that God holds certain very definite relations to spiritual change in the life of man; psychology is not in position to either affirm or deny the truth of this assertion. It reports the change, explains its nature and genetic relations in the conscious life, but cannot transcend its own field of observation. I repeat, however, my emphasis on the necessity for a knowledge of the psychology which lies at the basis of Christian teaching concerning the soul. If we do not understand the spiritual facts which underlie doctrines and statements of experience, and understand these facts with clear and vivid apprehension, we shall leave out the most necessary of all elements for the proper interpretation of the words that are before us. We shall simply be persuading ourselves that we know when as a matter of fact we have not gone beyond an arbitrary construction of certain words. The words or symbols may then become but bandages over our intellectual sight, effectually preventing our coming to that which alone can satisfy, namely, the reality of experience. This will be true with the grandest utterances of inspired truth and with the most exact theological statement relating to the experience of the Christian life. When a Christian minister uses the splendid words of divine revelation or the stately phraseology of our Christian dogmas without clear appreciation of the conscious facts for which they stand any keen observer gill

detect the note of unreality, however sincere he may feel the preacher to be; he will feel that his words have not been brought into vital touch with the data of experience. Any Christian teacher who fails to connect teaching and life, and interpret the former by the latter, is getting not only himself into confusion, but, worse than that, he is confusing souls that hear him. He may have the experience which will keep him steady in the midst of mental entanglement but he cannot be so sure that others have the same advantage. Do I seem too much concerned about this matter? Are not preachers, with the Christian experience filling and satisfying their souls, actually leading souls to spiritual life, and training them in spiritual life, without having had so much as the A. B. C. of psychological instruction? This is undoubtedly the fact; but to increase the equipment of an already efficient spiritual agent cannot possibly lessen this efficiency. Observation also teaches that those who have had marked success with the masses of the people still find themselves almost helpless in the presence of a large class of persons whose spiritual needs they but imperfectly understand, and for whose spiritual relief they can but imperfectly prescribe. A better understanding of the human soul in its normal and abnormal operations would put a powerful instrument into the hands of earnest Christian ministers who are concerned about these people whom they cannot reach. There are also a large number of ministers who bear on their hearts the burden of a failure in their efforts to win men to the Christian life. These men do not know why they have failed. They know that they have not been unfaithful; they comfort themselves in some poor way by reflecting that Christ himself was not greatly successful while he was on earth. These men would in many cases know why they had failed, or rather whether they had failed, had they but studied the facts and conclusions of psychological science.

One of the impressive things, impressive not in a favorable but rather in an unfavorable sense, in religious work, is the mechanical character which much of it bears. Men are following the prevailing mode without knowing why; the younger men are doing as the older men have done, and the best that can be said is that the older men have had success. The reason for their success

is not often a matter of conscientious investigation. Moreover, what is success in religious work? For lack of knowing what actually takes place in religious life the tests of success are made too outward and mechanical; and worst of all, because we do not know the significance and relations of spiritual states, we deal with souls in intense spiritual distress in the most mechanical and uniform way. Nowhere is it so necessary to be intensely individual and completely intelligent in our line of action as in dealing with souls which need spiritual counsel and encouragement. There are two points which the study of psychology in a general way emphasizes. In the first place, the normal development of the soul cannot by any fair construction be termed wrong or sinful. The knowledge of the psychology of the normal life will therefore disclose to us what "rightousness," "holiness," "moral purity," "cleanness of heart," or whatever our Christian terminology may use in describing the state, is as a fact in life. In the second place, psychology shows that the abnormal, in so far as responsibility attaches to it, is never fairly designated as anything else than wrong or sinful. The study of the abnormal development of the self, as it is presented in psychology, will give us the facts of life corresponding to the Christian conceptions of "wickedness," "unholiness," "impurity," "corruption," "depravity," etc. The study of both aspects of the psychical life are important to those who are set to eradicate sin and implant righteousness in men.

The sympathetic study of the facts of the human spirit will leave with the minister of the gospel the following inestimable results: (1) An intense appreciation of the value of a soul; (2) a thrilling conception of its possibilities of development; (3) a vision of the priceless worth of the Christian salvation as a fact of experience; (4) a burning conviction of the soul's indispensable need of God; (5) a perception of the measureless importance of the world of men and things for the discipline and growth of the soul; (6) an appreciation of the fact and nature of temptation, ever near, real, and terrible; (7) a sight of the frightful nature of sin as a fact. A man who knows the psychology of religion, to speak of that special aspect of psychology more particularly, has no standing ground as a rationalist, for psychology makes

it clear that religion is a fact of life which must of necessity be recorded as grounded in the constitution of man. It is not a theory to be explained on the basis of either speculation or experience. It is a capacity native to man which finds in experience the opportunity of its exercise. Moreover, psychology makes it clear that, like all deeper elements of our experience, religion in its foundation and essence is matter of feeling, not of reflective reasoning. The course of religious development has throughout had as its power and impulse the emotions. It has been guided by the reason, but the deeper element has been that of feeling. A rationalistic denial of the validity and worth of religion must rest upon the basis of a poor psychology.

It has been obvious throughout this discussion that psychology is intensely concerned with the individual. If it study the social environment it is for the purpose of discovering its relation to the perfection of the individual self. Religion, too, is most of all concerned with the soul as a unit. Whatever be the social influence of Christianity it is realized through the development of individual activity; and if we are striving for the establishment of a society which we describe as the kingdom of God, we realize that the attainment of this social ideal depends upon the influence of Christianity upon the individual. Religion recognizes that the social atmosphere has a great deal to do with the advance of the spiritual life, but it, in its turn, depends for its character upon this individual spiritual life; hence, religion and psychology are two realms of intellectual interest which make prominent one and the same subject—the individual soul. Still thinking of this element of individuality, we may ask that ministers lay more stress upon the differences in disposition between man and man and upon the difference in views and aims which depends upon individuality of temperament. In no direction will psychology prove more useful than in that of accounting for the specialties of individual disposition. And a knowledge of psychology will give us a just estimate of what the Christian religion may be expected to accomplish in individual men, each with his own specialty of character.

Walter in Patton

ART. IX.-THE BIBLE ON THE TONGUE OF LINCOLN

FORTY-SIX years ago a man of Springfield, Illinois, to worldwide fame unknown, spoke farewell to his neighbors, commending them and himself to the keeping of God as, in his own words, he went forth to a task "greater than that which rested upon Washington." That man, born in obscurity, until seventeen knowing no teacher but nature and the blessed Book of nature's God, which was his dying mother's only legacy, and who in all his lifetime had not been ten months under human instructors, had yet before that parting day proved himself in the toughest contests a "master of assemblies" and a speechmaker worthy to rank among the mightiest ten that have ever held their fellow men enthralled. Seven years previously, upborne upon the wings of a new reform, he had so rushed through the "third heaven" of oratorical achievement that a dozen reporters, seated purposely to take notes of his speech as the chiefest event of the convention they were commissioned to report, were swiftly pulled to their feet to stand, like two thousand others, spellbound under the torrent of his thought, entirely forgotting their duty as scribes in their enthusiasm as patriots, and aware only at the close that they had listened to the greatest address ever delivered in the West, and in all likelihood, the greatest address of the generation then battling for human rights. The fragments of that famous Bloomington "Lost Speech," gathered by Miss Tarbell's persistence, fully warrant the laudation its thrilled hearers concurrently gave it. That speech was as sane as the Declaration of Independence, while as hot with aroused righteousness as the fieriest utterances of Mirabeau and Burke, or of Patrick Henry and Sam Adams combined.

It was not the known personality of either, much less the versatility of the darling son of the northern Democracy, which lifted the Illinois senatorial debate of 1858 into national and international prominence. That elevation of a debate which, given simply two men of even Douglas's caliber, would have been a mere prairie roustabout, was due to the moral and intellectual grandeur