that act which constitutes the beginning of the religious life--call
it faith, or trust, or self-surrender, or by whatever name you
will--there is involved the identification of the finite with a life
which is eternally realized. It is true indeed that the religious life
is progressive; but understood in the light of the foregoing idea,
religious progress is not progress TOWARDS, but WITHIN the sphere of
the Infinite. It is not the vain attempt by endless finite additions
or increments to become possessed of infinite wealth, but it is the
endeavor, by the constant exercise of spiritual activity, to
appropriate that infinite inheritance of which we are already in
possession. The whole future of the religious life is given in its
beginning, but it is given implicitly. The position of the man who has
entered on the religious life is that evil, error, imperfection, do not
really belong to him: they are excrescences which have no organic
relation to his true nature: they are already virtually, as they will
be actually, suppressed and annulled, and in the very process of being
annulled they become the means of spiritual progress. Though he is not
exempt from temptation and conflict, [yet] in that inner sphere in
which his true life lies, the struggle is over, the victory already
achieved. It is not a finite but an infinite life which the spirit
lives. Every pulse-beat of its [existence] is the expression and
realization of the life of God."[299]

[299] John Caird: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion London
and New York, 1880, pp. 243-250, and 291-299, much abridged.

You will readily admit that no description of the phenomena of the
religious consciousness could be better than these words of your
lamented preacher and philosopher. They reproduce the very rapture of
those crises of conversion of which we have been hearing; they utter
what the mystic felt but was unable to communicate; and the saint, in
hearing them, recognizes his own experience. It is indeed gratifying
to find the content of religion reported so unanimously. But when all
is said and done, has Principal Caird--and I only use him as an example
of that whole mode of thinking--transcended the sphere of feeling and
of the direct experience of the individual, and laid the foundations of
religion in impartial reason? Has he made religion universal by
coercive reasoning, transformed it from a private faith into a public
certainty? Has he