of of God's existence, because
it is discernible only to the eye of faith and cannot be brought home
to unregenerate reason. I do not imagine that he will take this line,
for it would come dangerously near to identifying God with
Providence--a heresy which he abhors. But supposing some other adept
in "modern religion" were to make this claim on behalf of the
Invisible King, would it go any way towards persuading us that we owe
him our allegiance?

The assumption would be, as I understand it, that of a finite God,
unable to modify the operations of matter, but with an unlimited, or
at any rate a very great, power of influencing the workings of the
human mind. He would have no control over meteorological conditions:
he could not "ride in the whirlwind and direct the storm"; he could
not subdue the earthquake or prevent the Greenland glacier from
"calving" icebergs into the Atlantic. He could not release the human
body from the rhythms of growth and decay; he could not eradicate that
root of all evil, the association of consciousness with a mechanism
requiring to be constantly stoked with a particular sort of fuel which
exists only in limited quantities. If God could arrange for life to be
maintained on a diet of inorganic substances--if he could enable
animals, like plants, to go direct to minerals and gases for their
sustenance, instead of having it, so to speak, half-digested in the
vegetable kingdom--or even if, under the present system, he could make
fecundity, in any given species, automatically proportionate to the
supply of food--he would at one stroke refashion earthly life in an
extremely desirable sense. But this we assume to be beyond his
competence: the Veiled Being has autocratically imposed the struggle
for existence as an inexorable condition of the Invisible King's
activities, except in so far as it can be eluded by and through the
human intelligence. His problem, then, will be to guide the minds of
men towards a realization that their higher destiny lies in using
their intelligence to substitute ordered co-operation for the
sanguinary competition above which merely instinctive organism are
incapable of rising.

Observe that in exercising this power of psychical influence there
would be no sort of miracle-working, no interference with the order of
nature. The influence of mind upon mind, even without the intervention
of words or other symbols, is a part of the order of nature which no
one to-day dreams