bodied in it constituting its truth.(966)

In reading this painful record, we feel ourselves in contact with a mind
cultivated in miscellaneous science and in the Semitic languages,
disciplined as well as informed; which lays bare with transparent
sincerity the history of the stages through which he has successively
passed. Hitherto we have seen only the destructive side of his teaching;
but he also strove to attain a definite dogma: his truth-searching spirit,
touched by deep longings for the presence of God, could not rest in the
blank of unbelief. The nature of this attempt is developed in a work on
"the Soul,"(967) in which the author lays bare at once his psychology, his
ethics, and his religion; which in substance are not unlike those of the
writer last named. He lays the foundation of religion in the spiritual
faculty, the sense of the infinite personality; showing the generation of
the various complex feelings which make up religion--awe, wonder,
admiration, reverence--as the attributes of this divine Personality
successively discover themselves.(968) Holding strongly the doctrine of
human freedom and the natural existence of a moral sense, he allows fully
the existence of the consciousness of sin,(969) and the necessity of
spiritual regeneration; asserting the belief in God's sympathy and
communion with the soul, the efficacy of prayer, and the duty of
encouraging holy aspirations.(970)

Few more suggestive, and in many respects few truer, specimens exist of
the analysis of those facts of human nature which concern the basis of
natural religion and of the spiritual life,(971) than that which he has
offered in order to find a psychological basis for religion. The deep
spiritual longing for communion with God, the belief in prayer and in
moral renewal, are evidences of a creed which separate him utterly from
the naturalism and pantheism before described, and place him almost on the
frontier line between Christianity and deism.(972) And we may be permitted
to express the belief, that philosophy could not have raised him to his
present moral standard. His spirituality is due to the fragments of
Christianity which he has retained in his system. It has been truly said,
that the defenders of natural religion furtively kindle their torches by
the light of revealed.

In the course of this sketch of contemporary unbelief, we have gradually
advanced from the forms most alien to faith, till we have reached the
threshold