196 THE LIGHT OF DAT 



man cannot counterfeit any real intellectual quality 

 or any real power of the spirit, but the spiritual 

 discernment of evangelical theology cannot be com- 

 municated or verified. A man says he has it, and 

 that is all we can know about it. He says he dis- 

 cerns certain things to be true, but he cannot convey 

 his mode of viewing them to us, so that we shall 

 see them to be true also. Of course a man who has 

 no faculty for music cannot appreciate the charm or 

 the truth of music. Ko, but those who have this 

 gift can give us proof of it. 



St. Paul's power of spiritual discernment was no 

 different in kind from that of many other men be- 

 fore- and since his time. How did it differ from 

 Carlyle's power of spiritual discernment, or from 

 Schiller's, or from Plato's, or from that of Epictetus ? 

 He had no deeper insight into human nature or into 

 the workings of men's minds or into the mysteries 

 that shroud human life. He had great religious 

 power, great heroism, great wisdom, a lofty spiritual 

 nature, but it was genetically the same as that of 

 other men. Milton did not write his poems out of 

 his Puritanism, out of the kind of spiritual know- 

 ledge Puritans are supposed to possess. Words- 

 worth wrote out of the spirit of his natural religion, 

 not out of his orthodoxy, or wranatural religion. 



Indeed, when people have written poetry or com- 

 posed any other work of art out of what they have 

 called their spiritual life alone, the product has not 

 been such as the world wanted to see live. In any 

 work of prose or verse, of science or philosophy, it is 



