mine, every desire that belongs to me as this
particular Self, and to become the pure medium of a thought that is
universal--in one word, to live no more my own life, but let my
consciousness be possessed and suffused by the Infinite and Eternal
life of spirit. And yet it is just in this renunciation of self that I
truly gain myself, or realize the highest possibilities of my own
nature. For whilst in one sense we give up self to live the universal
and absolute life of reason, yet that to which we thus surrender
ourselves is in reality our truer self. The life of absolute reason is
not a life that is foreign to us."

Nevertheless, Principal Caird goes on to say, so far as we are able
outwardly to realize this doctrine, the balm it offers remains
incomplete. Whatever we may be in posse, the very best of us in actu
falls very short of being absolutely divine. Social morality, love, and
self-sacrifice even, merge our Self only in some other finite self or
selves. They do not quite identify it with the Infinite. Man's ideal
destiny, infinite in abstract logic, might thus seem in practice
forever unrealizable.

"Is there, then," our author continues, "no solution of the
contradiction between the ideal and the actual? We answer, There is
such a solution, but in order to reach it we are carried beyond the
sphere of morality into that of religion. It may be said to be the
essential characteristic of religion as contrasted with morality, that
it changes aspiration into fruition, anticipation into realization;
that instead of leaving man in the interminable pursuit of a vanishing
ideal, it makes him the actual partaker of a divine or infinite life.
Whether we view religion from the human side or the divine--as the
surrender of the soul to God, or as the life of God in the soul--in
either aspect it is of its very essence that the Infinite has ceased to
be a far-off vision, and has become a present reality. The very first
pulsation of the spiritual life, when we rightly apprehend its
significance, is the indication that the division between the Spirit
and its object has vanished, that the ideal has become real, that the
finite has reached its goal and become suffused with the presence and
life of the Infinite.

"Oneness of mind and will with the divine mind and will is not the
future hope and aim of religion, but its very beginning and birth in
the soul. To enter on the religious life is to terminate the struggle.
In