everywhere obscures with its crowd of hungry, cruel, interested,
food-propitiated ghost-gods. In the religion of our Lord and the Apostles
the two currents of faith in one righteous God and care for the individual
soul were purified and combined. 'God is a Spirit, and they who worship
Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth.' Man also is a spirit, and,
as such, is in the hands of a God not to be propitiated by man's
sacrifice or monk's ritual. We know how this doctrine was again disturbed
by the Animism, in effect, and by the sacrifice and ritual of the
Mediaeval Church. Too eager 'to be all things to all men,' the august and
beneficent Mother of Christendom readmitted the earlier Animism in new
forms of saint-worship, pilgrimage, and popular ceremonial--things apart
from, but commonly supposed to be substitutes for, righteousness of life
and the selflessness enjoined in savage mysteries. For the softness, no
less than for the hardness of men's hearts, these things were ordained:
such as masses for the beloved dead.

Modern thought has deanthropomorphised what was left of anthropomorphic
in religion, and, in the end, has left us for God, at most, 'a stream
of tendency making for righteousness,' or an energy unknown and
unknowable--the ghost of a ghost. For the soul, by virtue of his
belief in which man raised himself in his own esteem, and, more or less,
in ethical standing, is left to us a negation or a wistful doubt.

To this part of modern scientific teaching the earlier position of this
essay suggests a demurrer. By aid of the tradition of and belief in
supernormal phenomena among the low races, by attested phenomena of the
same kinds of experience among the higher races, I have ventured to try to
suggest that 'we are not merely brain;' that man has his part, we know not
how, in we know not what--has faculties and vision scarcely conditioned by
the limits of his normal purview. The evidence of all this deals with
matters often trivial, like the electric sparks rubbed from the deer's
hide, which yet are cognate with an illimitable, essential potency of the
universe. Not being able to explain away these facts, or, in this place,
to offer what would necessarily be a premature theory of them, I regard
them, though they seem shadowy, as grounds of hope, or, at least, as
tokens that men need not yet despair. Not now for the first time have weak
things of the earth been chosen to confound things strong. Nor have men o