herwise with religious opinions. Their value can only
be ascertained by spiritual judgments directly passed upon them,
judgments based on our own immediate feeling primarily; and secondarily
on what we can ascertain of their experiential relations to our moral
needs and to the rest of what we hold as true.

Immediate luminousness, in short, philosophical reasonableness, and
moral helpfulness are the only available criteria. Saint Teresa might
have had the nervous system of the placidest cow, and it would not now
save her theology, if the trial of the theology by these other tests
should show it to be contemptible. And conversely if her theology can
stand these other tests, it will make no difference how hysterical or
nervously off her balance Saint Teresa may have been when she was with
us here below.

You see that at bottom we are thrown back upon the general principles
by which the empirical philosophy has always contended that we must be
guided in our search for truth. Dogmatic philosophies have sought for
tests for truth which might dispense us from appealing to the future.
Some direct mark, by noting which we can be protected immediately and
absolutely, now and forever, against all mistake--such has been the
darling dream of philosophic dogmatists. It is clear that the ORIGIN
of the truth would be an admirable criterion of this sort, if only the
various origins could be discriminated from one another from this point
of view, and the history of dogmatic opinion shows that origin has
always been a favorite test. Origin in immediate intuition; origin in
pontifical authority; origin in supernatural revelation, as by vision,
hearing, or unaccountable impression; origin in direct possession by a
higher spirit, expressing itself in prophecy and warning; origin in
automatic utterance generally--these origins have been stock warrants
for the truth of one opinion after another which we find represented in
religious history. The medical materialists are therefore only so many
belated dogmatists, neatly turning the tables on their predecessors by
using the criterion of origin in a destructive instead of an
accreditive way.

They are effective with their talk of pathological origin only so long
as supernatural origin is pleaded by the other side, and nothing but
the argument from origin is under discussion. But the argument from
origin has seldom been used alone, for it is too obviously
insufficient. Dr. Maudsley is