NATURAL TEESUS SUPEENATUEAL 63 



tetus and Cicero and Lucretius, or Spinoza, or of 

 Darwin, as of no avail, as only snares of Satan ? 

 The flowering of man's spiritual nature is as natural 

 and as strict a process of evolution as the opening 

 of a rose or a morning-glory. The vital inflorescent 

 forces are from within, and are continuous from the 

 root up. But there is this difference : While the 

 plant must have a congenial environment, light, 

 warmth, etc., the human flowering often takes place 

 amid the most adverse surroundings, but no more so 

 in the religious sphere than in the intellectual. 



Neither would I say that the " conversion " upon 

 which our Puritan ancestors laid such stress, and 

 which is so dramatically illustrated in the case of 

 Paul, was not genuine. It was genuine to them, but 

 it was entirely a subjective phenomenon, like the 

 faith cures we now often hear about ; it was the 

 power of the imagination working upon the con- 

 science. It is not a necessary or universal experi- 

 ence, even among religious people. It may be said 

 without any irreverence that it has gone out of fash- 

 ion. The predisposition for that kind of experience 

 no longer exists. " The belief in witchcraft," says 

 Milman, " made people fancy themselves witches," 

 and the belief in the efficacy of sudden conversions 

 led to these kinds of moral and spiritual earthquakes. 



Science looks upon religion as belonging to the 

 sphere of the natural ; it is the legitimate outcome 

 of man's moral nature ; the term that best expresses 

 the complete development and flowering of all his 

 faculties. To define it in the guarded terms which 



