The more concrete objects of most men's religion, the deities whom they
worship, are known to them only in idea. It has been vouchsafed, for
example, to very few Christian believers to have had a sensible vision
of their Saviour; though enough appearances of this sort are on record,
by way of miraculous exception, to merit our attention later. The
whole force of the Christian religion, therefore, so far as belief in
the divine personages determines the prevalent attitude of the
believer, is in general exerted by the instrumentality of pure ideas,
of which nothing in the individual's past experience directly serves as
a model.

But in addition to these ideas of the more concrete religious objects,
religion is full of abstract objects which prove to have an equal
power. God's attributes as such, his holiness, his justice, his mercy,
his absoluteness, his infinity, his omniscience, his tri-unity, the
various mysteries of the redemptive process, the operation of the
sacraments, etc., have proved fertile wells of inspiring meditation for
Christian believers.[21] We shall see later that the absence of
definite sensible images is positively insisted on by the mystical
authorities in all religions as the sine qua non of a successful
orison, or contemplation of the higher divine truths. Such
contemplations are expected (and abundantly verify the expectation, as
we shall also see) to influence the believer's subsequent attitude very
powerfully for good.

[21] Example: "I have had much comfort lately in meditating on the
passages which show the personality of the Holy Ghost, and his
distinctness from the Father and the Son. It is a subject that
requires searching into to find out, but, when realized, gives one so
much more true and lively a sense of the fullness of the Godhead, and
its work in us and to us, than when only thinking of the Spirit in its
effect on us." Augustus Hare: Memorials, i. 244, Maria Hare to Lucy H.
Hare.

Immanuel Kant held a curious doctrine about such objects of belief as
God, the design of creation, the soul, its freedom, and the life
hereafter. These things, he said, are properly not objects of
knowledge at all. Our conceptions always require a sense-content to
work with, and as the words soul," "God," "immortality," cover no
distinctive sense-content whatever, it follows that theoretically
speaking they are words devoid of any significance. Yet strangely
enough they have a definite