to
keep a reckoning of the physical atoms with which the natural life
builds up the body. Hence, every attempt to justify these truths seems
inadequate; and the defence which the understanding sets up for the
faith, always seems partial and cold. Who ever fully expressed his
deepest convictions? The consciousness of the dignity of the moral law
affected Kant like the view of the starry firmament, and generated a
feeling of the sublime which words could not express; and the religious
ecstasy of the saints cannot be confined within the channels of speech,
but floods the soul with overmastering power, possessing all its
faculties. In this respect, it will always remain true that the greatest
facts of human experience reach beyond all knowledge. Nay, we may add
further, that in this respect the simplest of these facts passes all
understanding. Still, as we have already seen, it is reason that
constitutes them; that which is presented to reason for explanation, in
knowledge and morality and religion, is itself the product of reason.
Reason is the power which, by interaction with our environment, has
generated the whole of our experience. And, just as natural science
interprets the phenomena given to it by ordinary opinion, _i.e._,
interprets and purifies a lower form of knowledge by converting it into
a higher; so the task of reason when it is exercised upon morality and
religion, is simply to evolve, and amplify the meaning of its own
products. The movement from morality and religion to moral philosophy
and the philosophy of religion, is thus a movement from reason to
reason, from the implicit to the explicit, from the germ to the
developed fulness of life and structure. In this matter, as in all
others wherein the human spirit is concerned, that which is first by
nature is last in genesis--[Greek: nika d' ho protos kai teleutaios
dramon.] The whole history of the moral and religious experience of
mankind is comprised in the statement, that the implicit reason which we
call "faith" is ever developing towards full consciousness of itself;
and that, at its first beginning, and throughout the whole ascending
process of this development, the highest is present in it as a
self-manifesting power.

But this process from the almost instinctive intuitions of the heart
towards the morality and religion of freedom, being a process of
evolution, necessarily involves conflict. There are men, it is true, the
unity of whose moral and rel