o39th ORDINAKY GENERAL MEETI^TG; 



HELD IN THE ROOMS OF THE INSTITUTE ON 

 MONDAY, FEBRUARY 3rd, 1913, at 4.30 p.m. 



Mr. David Howard, V.P., iook the Chair. 



The Minutes of the preceding Meeting were read and signed. 



The Secretary announced that Miss Cruddas had been elected a 

 Member, and the Rev. W. Laporte Payne an Associate of the Institute. 



The Chairman then called upon the Rev. Dr. Skrine to read his 

 paper. 



VISION, IN SACRED ANH OTHER HISTORY, 

 By the Rev. John Huntley Skrine, D.D. 



MY title may suggest a scope too great to be modestly 

 proposed for a brief paper, and I must begin by 

 defining the limits of the inquiry. "Vision " is a name, in its 

 higher use, for the contact through the senses of finite human 

 nature with the infinite, and to ask Avhat Vision is might be 

 asking to " know what God and man is." To ask that question, 

 however, is what man is for ; and to gain some morsel of that 

 truth shall be the purpose of this inquiry, which will place 

 side by side two stories, recorded one in sacred, the other in 

 secular literature, of visions of the supernatural world, and 

 endeavour to extract from the comparison some element of fact 

 as to the relations of divine and human. 



The story I take from the Scriptures is the record either of 

 an illusion or of the most cardinal event in man's history. It is 

 the vision seen by Mary of Nazareth, when the angel Gabriel 

 was sent from heaven to a virgin espoused to Joseph, a 

 carpenter of Nazareth, and announced to her the birth from her 

 womb of the Messiah. 



Beside this story I will place the tale of another woman who, 

 through the impulsion of a vision, having some features in 

 common with that of Mary, entered on a fate which had issues 

 incommensurate indeed with those wdiich sprang from the 



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