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and eternity than the fact that lie has given certain qualities to 

 certain portions of matter that they retain as long as they exist 

 at all, and to others the quality of being changed by time or other 

 agents and different circumstances, and becoming apparently 

 different things according to our limited views and feeble 

 nomenclature. Of course, the effort of those whose idea is the 

 deification of man and his self-creation will point to analogies 

 from non-vital things and bring in Man as only a self-superior 

 creation as a deduction from their theories, but this is only one 

 of the many phases of unbelief which from time to time has 

 grown up and which has its day until some more popular 

 notion takes hold of the imagination and succeeds in an ever- 

 recurring cycle in capturing a body of adherents. Indeed, we 

 are now assured " that Primitive Credulity is dead and Intel- 

 lectual Belief is dying, and that the fate of Christianity rests 

 in the hands of emotional belief." 



Unfortunately, emotional belief leads too often to delusion. 

 Joanna Southcott and, in his latter days, Mr. Irving, a preacher 

 of rare eloquence, took to the belief that he had the power 

 of communicating his thoughts in an unknown tongue, and 

 few here can remember the distress which was felt at the injury 

 to the religious belief of many who had been delighted with 

 his eloquence and undoubted piety. 



In our own day Professor James finds it to be the worship of 

 material luxury and w^ealth which constitutes so large a portion 

 of the spirit of our age — that which produces effeminacy and 

 unmanliness. 



It is no new experience that emotional and highly sensitive 

 persons should suppose themselves endowed with what for want 

 of a better word I will call supernatural power. I believe 

 there exists among us a fancy that people are distinguished 

 by colours floating round their heads. It is called an " aura." 

 The good are blue, the bad are red, and only people who are 

 enlightened are accommodated with an aura of their own, but, if 

 Mr. James is right in his view of what " the great age produces," 

 it is no wonder that delusions should flourish and that the 

 halo of the mediaeval painters should present themselves to 

 weak and hysterical persons as something that they imagine 

 round their own heads, and think they see on their neighbours. 



Mr. Ladd in his Pliilosoyhy of Religion says, " In the United 

 States to-day Christian Science is forming a grotesque mixture 

 of crude Pantheism, misunderstood psychological and philo- 

 sophical truth, and truly Christian beliefs and conceptions." 

 Whether the great prophet of Christian Science is still alive or 



