RECONSTRUCTION AND RESTATEMENT. 



15* 



philosophic s'appelle cecite." Because these perceptions are- 

 arrived at, or communicated, through a faculty that is not the- 

 reason, we must, therefore, neither on the one hand deny their 

 reality, nor on the other refuse to apply our reason so that we- 

 may understand them. None of our faculties — that of sight,, 

 for example — would be of real use to us, did we not use our 

 intellects to comprehend the perceptions afforded by the faculty 

 that receives them. The intellectual testing of religious- 

 perceptions is therefore a prime duty. 



But what is it to which this religious faculty impels the seeker 

 after truth ? He finds himself, in common with all Christians,. 

 Brahmins, Buddhists, Moslems and Jews, impelled toward an 

 ideal of perfect being, of a Most High. He finds himself iii 

 the presence of a conviction that He is : he experiences an 

 indestructible impulse to worship that which he feels to be- 

 Best. He may have gone further, as many of us have done,, 

 and may have found that in none of these religions he can. 

 discover a higher ideal of righteousness than in the Bible 

 of the Jews, and in none a more sublime example of human 

 devotion than in the records of the life of Jesus Christ, whom,, 

 whether human or superhuman, as His followers hold Him 

 to be, he feels to represent the supreme development of 

 human character, a presentation of the divine possibilities- 

 in man, nay, even a revelation in human form of the Divine. 

 Alike in obedience to the religious instinct within him, and. 

 in wondering admiration of the perfect life, how can lie, 

 having travelled thus far in the spiritual pilgrimage, but 

 attempt at least to become a follower of Christ ? Nay, if he be- 

 a real truth-seeker, one who has no other aim than to find, 

 and follow truth, there is for him no alternative; follower 

 of Christ he must strive to be ; nay, by that very striving a 

 follower of Christ, at however great a distance, he has already- 

 become. 



To such a one, whose religion is thus an inner conviction, not 

 founded on any external authority, no intellectual proofs of 

 Christianity are needed : none can replace the personal revela- 

 tion that is his own. Arguments founded on "analogies" and 

 " evidences " are largely wasted on him. He needs no miracle- 

 mongering to convince him. Nay, he will hold to his faith in 

 Christ in spite of all the miracles that a credulous and non- 

 scientific age heaped up around the historical narratives of His 

 birth and life and death. Not even the wildest of them — and 

 the orthodox Church rejected many more than it retained — will 

 shake his faith. He knows that exactly the same kind of sacred 



