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swer and the method of its answer with God. If prayer does not mean this, it means very little to any purpose in the presence of our mixed experience and confused apprehension.

Yet an event that involves a manifest suspension of natural law does not lie within the purvey of prayer. Natural law, when it has taken effect, is a declaration of the divine will, and that will once expressed may well restrain prayer. David prayed for the life of his child till the child was dead. When it was dead, he arose from the earth, washed and anointed himself, and changed his apparel and came into the house of the Lord. Paul besought the Lord thrice that his thorn in the flesh might depart from him, and then accepted it under the assurance, My grace shall be sufficient for you. This hovering between the possible and the impossible, resting on the divine will, is a most rational discipline, deeply embodied in prayer.

The mind, imbued with a sense of causes simply, may think this attitude of prayer a stupid double-dealing of the mind with itself, a weak hoping for things which natural data do not include. We make answer, that this riddle of God's gift in the external world is no more difficult to read than that contained in our own lives. As spiritual beings we are inclosed in physical dependencies; yet we are aided, not smothered, by them. In a world in which there is this pervasive interplay of matter and mind, mind must seize and retain its initiative. We can only have an illusion of wisdom if we regard the world as physical to its The substance of wisdom at once slips from us. very core. The hawk poised motionless on its wings, using the air as a nest, and looking down composedly on the inferior lives that creep and walk and run beneath it, is not less natural than these prone creatures of whose limitations it makes a mock. Our wisdom is to be true to our own nature. We can no more allow causes to repress reasons than reasons

to forget causes. This subject of the supernatural has offered itself, in many ways, to my mind during a long life, and I still feel that the deepest revelation of the world sustains the spirit in even poise on these two wings of thoughtthe natural and the supernatural.

The problem of the freedom and the validity of thought repeats itself in closely allied terms in this problem of the supernatural-the Divine Soul of the world present in the world for its momentary guidance and government. It is irrational to think ourselves free and nothing else free in the universe. This is not only to regard ourselves as incomparably superior to all that incloses us, it is to create a suffocating spiritual atmosphere in which our higher powers are sure to perish. If we are to live and move and have a spiritual being, we must live and move and have our being in God. No other correlation is possible to us. We are so in the image of God that without the presence of God we are alien and strangers in the world to which we belong. A sense of the consistency of things, itself the depth of reason, makes us sure of a pervasive spiritual Power.

The two supports of faith are as sure as anything can be in human thought. The first is the certainty of independent power-the mind's ability to seek, to find, and to use the truth. Without this the whole structure of knowledge crumbles into dust. The second is the coherence of the world-rationally apprehended and empirically knownwithin itself, the constructive harmony of its several parts. If the relation of the natural and the supernatural is somewhat as we have sketched it, two things follow. The past, in spite of its errors, is gathered up in the present; and the present is passing into a brighter future by virtue of one continuous movement. There has been and is a true spiritual evolution, a perpetual growth toward the light.

It does not do to say that the history of the world has

been continuous superstition, endlessly diversified error. By such an assertion we trip our own feet as certainly as the feet of other people. We must find a path of progress in the past, if we are to have any correction in the present or hope in the future. It is the continuity of human experience, its undeniably evolutionary character, which justifies its successive steps as factors in growth. If men have, from the beginning, been forcing their way into a spiritual world, and that world proves a delusion, then there is small confidence to be placed in their faculties, however employed. We lose the overwhelming induction of validity and reality in the intellectual world.

The sense of the supernatural goes hand in hand with a mastery of the natural. Human skill and human will penetrate far more deeply into causes than ever before. The voice of man runs a thousand miles and is still unwearied. Indeed, the chief value of the recognition of the stability of physical law has been the larger mental scope gained thereby. No matter how much the world towers in strength, the feet of men are still above it.

In the intellectual kingdom the growth of the supernat ural is equally marked. Wisdom and love find identification in the character of God, and, as ever-growing forces in society, give promise of the kingdom of heaven. Purity of heart, as a true reconciliation of the wants and powers of men, is becoming a medium of strength, a coalescence of the life of man with the life of God. The world, physical and spiritual, submits to nothing so absolutely as to goodness. We shall never truly interpret the natural, much less master it in its service to man, till it becomes to us a perfect reflection of the snpernatural, a limit along which the thoughts of man and the thoughts of God meet in perpetual creation.

The miracles of Christ reach here their highest intelligibility, as spiritual power winning a new and deeper hold

on the physical world. The spirit, ordinarily so checked by ignorance and held back by sin, begins in Christ to force a more beneficent way among things. There is a power in a pure, wise, and comprehensive purpose as yet but partially disclosed to us. The spirit heals the spirit, and in healing the spirit begins to heal the body. The kingdom of heaven is the renovating force of a new life. All real victory is a conquest of inner, spiritual power over external conditions. The natural discloses its true glory as the medium of the supernatural.

ARTICLE III.

THE GROWING SOCIALISM.

BY THE REVEREND ANDREW BURNS CHALMERS.

"ALL that I have is mine, and all that you have is mine if I can get it," is an expression of the selfish individualism of our race at the beginning. Every babe begins where the race began,-in selfishness. The great raceman was ready selfishly to seize and appropriate everything, bidden and forbidden; the baby of to-day will toddle off his own yard to the playground of his little neighbor, and become a first-class freebooter. To the strong baby belong the spoils of the selfish struggle. Each individual is a miniature of the race. The human family began in individualism, and is surely, if slowly, going toward socialism; the individual always begins in selfishness, and gradually grows toward unselfishness. The last man of the race must win anew in his personal life the victories that all the struggles of our humanity have won since the beginning. All the dead ancestors of a man arise from the grave of a hundred thousand years, and compel him-a new child of the race-to conquer them anew, on his march toward the goal of goodness.

If each individual has, gathered up in his completed physical life, all the elementary forms of animal life, from the simplest protoplasmic process to the Divine-human form, shall he not personally pass through all the degrees of growth, mentally and morally? At one period in his development he has no more mentality than a tadpole; at another, no more spirituality than a Hottentot.

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