278 THE VEBY REV. H. WACE, D.D.^ ON SOME OP 



edition of the book to which I am referring) asks : " What is 

 it that puts the body together, and keeps it active and retains 

 it fairly constant through all the vicissitudes of climate 

 and condition, and through all the fluctuations of atomic 

 constitution ? " "... We call it," he says, " life ; we call it 

 soul ; we call it by various names, and we do not know what 

 it is. But common sense rebels against its being 'nothing'; 

 nor has any genuine science presumed to declare that it is purely 

 imaginary." " . . . . The following definition may sufficiently 

 represent my present meaning. The soul is that controlling and 

 guiding principle which is responsible for our personal expression, 

 and for the construction of the body, under the conditions of 

 physical condition and ancestry. In its higher development 

 it includes also feeling and intelligence and will, and is 

 the storehouse of mental experience. The body is its instru- 

 ment or organ, enabling it to receive and to convey 

 physical impressions, and to affect and be affected by matter 



and energy Moreover, in the higher organisms, the 



soul conspicuously has lofty potentialities ; it not only 

 includes what is meant by the term ' mind,' but it begins 

 to acquire some of the character of ' spirit/ by which means 

 it becomes related to the Divine being. Soul appears to 

 be the link between ' spirit ' and ' matter ' : and, according to its 

 grade, it may be chiefly associated with one or with the other of 

 these two great aspects of the universe." 



What an immense advance upon the hard material view of man 

 and nature from which we started ! I cannot follow Sir Oliver 

 in all his theological discussions, in which I may, without dis- 

 respect, presume that he is less at home than in the natural 

 f5cience in which he is so eminent. But it is evident that these 

 observations on the soul, based upon purely scientific conceptions, 

 render intelligible and reasonable the beliefs of Christianity, and 

 the teaching of the Scriptures, respecting those influences of the 

 spiritual world upon the material which are cardinal elements in 

 our Faith. If the soul has this influence upon matter and ether, 

 what is there inconsistent with Science — as, indeed, Sir Oliver 

 proceeds to suggest — in the predictions of St Paul of the re- 

 appearance of the soul in a spiritual body, or of the influences 

 of spiritual power upon matter upon which the possibility of such 

 miracles as those of the Gospel depends ? A great window is 

 opened to us in the vision of the universe, through w^hich we 

 discern " the promise and the potency " (in Professor Tyndall's 

 phrase) — not of matter, as he understoud it, but of influences 

 infinitely superior to matter, and capable of modifying, by superior 



