hese three. Are they not
sufficient to be the beginnings of the religious life in the young? To
theological learning, traditional creeds, and conventional worship they
may seem primitive, slight in substance, meagre in apparel; but one who
is seeking, not things to believe, but things to live, desires the
elementary. In setting forth first principles, the elaboration of a more
highly organized knowledge may be felt as an obscuration of truth, an
impediment to certainty, a hindrance in the effort to touch and handle
the essential matter; and for this reason a teacher dispenses with much
in his exposition, just as in talking to a child a grown man abandons
nine-tenths of his vocabulary. In the same way, learning as a child,
seeking in the life of the soul with God what is normal, vital, and
universal, the beginner need not feel poor and balked, because he does
not avail himself as yet of resources that belong to length of life,
breadth of scholarship, intellectual power, the saint's ardour, the
seer's insight.

"The spiritual life here defined, elementary as it is, appears
inevitable, part and parcel of our natural being. Why should this be
surprising? Surely if there be a revelation of the divine at all, it
must be one independent of external things; one that comes to all by
virtue of their human nature; one that is direct, and not mediately
given through others. Faith that is vital is not the fruit of things
told of, but of things experienced. It follows that religion may be
essentially free from any admixture of the past in its communication to
the soul. It cannot depend on events of a long-past time now disputable,
or on books of a far-off and now alien age. These things are the
tradition and history of the spiritual life, but not the life. To the
mass of men religion derived from such sources would be a belief in
other men's experience, and for most of them would rest on proofs they
cannot scrutinize. It would be a religion of authority, not of personal
and intimate conviction. Just as creation may be felt, not as some
far-off event, but a continuing act, revelation itself is a present
reality. Do not the heavens still declare the glory of God as when they
spoke to the Psalmist? and has the light that lighteth every man who is
born into the world ceased to burn in the spirit since the first candle
was lit on a Christian altar? If the revelation of glory and mercy be an
everlasting thing, and inextinguishable save in