it is only as paradoxically expressed that the intellect can handle the relation between them. But let the spectator be admitted to the interior, and take up a position, say, at the Then these polar opposites, with no change of place, lose at once their recalcitrant antagonism, and melt into the satisfying harmony of perfect form.

centre.

This surely may furnish some insight into the very obvious fact, that Paradoxical and Figurative expression runs conspicuously through the whole texture of the written Word, and is always most strikingly seen when it is the sublimities, on the one hand of the Divine Revelation, on the other, of that human experience which answers to them, that are being dealt with. Thus, again, it becomes clear that the function of language, when it is sought thereby to give adequate expression to Truth in the profoundest sense of that great word, can only realise its fulfilment as it sets itself free from logical restriction, amplifying its range of expression by large employments of imagery; and that when the Truth is of a kind that makes direct appeal to our moral and spiritual nature, and demands to

be translated into the activities of life, language

must fail altogether until it is supplemented by an informing spirit.

The words that I speak unto you,' says

Christ, they are Spirit, and they are Life.”

7 See Note 7.

LECTURE II.

KEEPING before us, then, this general introduction to the subject we have in hand, may I now be allowed to recapitulate, so far as to formulate distinctly the aim I have in view, the method I desire to follow, and, by implication, the spirit in which the quest should be pursued?

It is not the sceptic or the agnostic whose case I am desirous of considering, but rather that of a sincere and devout believer in Christ, the reality and blessedness of whose faith has been, and is continually certified to him by the great fact that it has at once quickened and satisfied his whole spiritual being.

I will suppose that this assurance has been wrought into the whole texture of his experience of life an experience, moreover, sufficiently full and varied to constitute him a fairly adequate

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type of a developed human life. Faith in the central truths of the Christian religion is unquestionably that by which, in the deepest sense, he lives. Its sufficiency has been exhibited and tested in the gravest and most critical passages of his life-history: his hold of it has been in consequence ever strengthened by its power to nerve, sustain, and comfort him in his encounter with the exigencies of life-its temptations, trials, and sorrows.

But, nevertheless, with all this absoluteness of assurance and conviction, he is at times very conscious that it has occupied too exclusively, if I may say so, a separated sphere, which he is accustomed to refer to as his 'spiritual life.' This it occupies in undisputed sovereignty. It is, moreover, the central sphere of his whole life, the metropolis of his soul's being that is thus occupied. But there are wide outlying provinces of his intellectual and emotional life which have never been brought into any organic relation with it.

Now such a man would acknowledge at once that this sovereignty has paramount rights in every region where his thoughts are busy and his

interest engaged. Yet do many of these lie apart in secular estrangement, if not even in covert hostility. And he has never to construe the apostolic injunction in its narrower and purely intellectual sense-attempted to bring 'every thought into captivity to Christ'; or if, indeed, he has, it has been by a method which is an outrage upon all thought-viz., forcible suppression and subjection.

Thus has arisen an unwarrantable cleavage in his intellectual life. It has become divided into departments, which, so far at least as this central province of his thought is concerned, have pursued an almost independent course.

If it has ever occurred to him that thought, as a vital product of a unitary being, ought to be itself an organic unity, penetrated and permeated throughout by the life-blood which has its spring in the throbbing centre of his spiritual being, to bring about this organisation of his entire thinking has seemed a desperate, even impossible task.

And the case is worse, because at times he is made plainly conscious that there is much in his mind that clearly has a necessary and important bearing upon the Faith in which his