perhaps the cleverest of the rebutters
of supernatural religion on grounds of origin. Yet he finds himself
forced to write:--

"What right have we to believe Nature under any obligation to do her
work by means of complete minds only? She may find an incomplete mind
a more suitable instrument for a particular purpose. It is the work
that is done, and the quality in the worker by which it was done, that
is alone of moment; and it may be no great matter from a cosmical
standpoint, if in other qualities of character he was singularly
defective--if indeed he were hypocrite, adulterer, eccentric, or
lunatic.... Home we come again, then, to the old and last resort of
certitude--namely the common assent of mankind, or of the competent by
instruction and training among mankind."[5]

[5] H. Maudsley: Natural Causes and Supernatural Seemings, 1886, pp.
256, 257.

In other words, not its origin, but THE WAY IN WHICH IT WORKS ON THE
WHOLE, is Dr. Maudsley's final test of a belief. This is our own
empiricist criterion; and this criterion the stoutest insisters on
supernatural origin have also been forced to use in the end. Among the
visions and messages some have always been too patently silly, among
the trances and convulsive seizures some have been too fruitless for
conduct and character, to pass themselves off as significant, still
less as divine. In the history of Christian mysticism the problem how
to discriminate between such messages and experiences as were really
divine miracles, and such others as the demon in his malice was able to
counterfeit, thus making the religious person twofold more the child of
hell he was before, has always been a difficult one to solve, needing
all the sagacity and experience of the best directors of conscience.
In the end it had to come to our empiricist criterion: By their fruits
ye shall know them, not by their roots. Jonathan Edwards's Treatise on
Religious Affections is an elaborate working out of this thesis. The
ROOTS of a man's virtue are inaccessible to us. No appearances
whatever are infallible proofs of grace. Our practice is the only sure
evidence, even to ourselves, that we are genuinely Christians.

"In forming a judgment of ourselves now," Edwards writes, we should
certainly adopt that evidence which our supreme Judge will chiefly make
use of when we come to stand before him at the last day.... There is
not one grace of the Spirit of God, of the existence of w