is in us, not so much as being of us, but a part of that inner man of which the body is a garment. It imagines, fears, anticipates, many things quite different to any present experience; so that by memory as to the past, and hope as to the future, it lives by a life which is not now. This living active principle is spiritual, and by its operation even the body, as Pliny notes of Democritus, has a resurrection.1 Homer spoke of the soul as having wings with which it flies to the mansions of Hades. Socrates declared that his immortal part was not buried with his body. The Stoics, Pythagoreans, Platonists, taught that man possessed more than this present life; and Cicero, we think, remarked that this presage of a future state was fullest and most powerful in men of greatest genius and grandest mind. St. Paul expressed the sentiment as an actual knowledge in Christians: "We know that if our earthly house of this tabernacle were dissolved, we have a building of God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens" (2 Cor. v. 1). The greatest authority the world has ever known, Jesus, said, "The wicked. . . shall go away into everlasting punishment; but the righteous into life eternal" (Matt. xxv. 46).

So universally operative is this imagination, as to a future condition; that it pervades all our mental states; no superstition is without it; diseased action of the brain and nerves knows of it; the least scientific have it as a sort of prepossession; and some of the most intelligent and truthful men in all ages declare that they have had messages from the dead; that, awake and asleep, they have heard voices, and seen visions, going 1 Plin., i. vii. c. 55.

о

beyond all that the natural eye, ear, hand of man, can attain; something spiritual, immortal, coming within the soul's observation.

A man is man, by power to keep his will in obedience to the understanding. A beast is beast, because its understanding is in subjection to the will, the passion, the instinct; and the beast not rising into consciousness of itself in relation to the eternal; not able to project itself in hope, or fear, or sense of responsibility, out of itself; belongs wholly to those general powers of nature into which it will pass. A man, by imagination, passes from everlasting to everlasting; has knowledge far beyond anything obtained by argumentation; looks behind things, beyond things; becomes aware of a Presence, not seen; of a Power, not fully felt; of a Life, an Energy, a Wisdom, in all, but above all, yet containing all. In this Presence he consciously lives, moves, and has his being. Because he is man, and not beast, he possesses the imagination that lays hold of these unseen realities, and lives in them, as the great realities of his own imperishable existence. He would be beast did he not so live; and did he not, by marrying his imagination to pure reason, have those good children, those springs of thought, beautiful as the rainbow; those conceptions of life which do not pass away; those views, as from a noble castle, of all things tending from the low to the high, from mortality to immortality, from the creature to the Creator; he would be as a man putting out his own eyes, or as a lion donning the ass's skin. As men we know that "all things are repaired by corrupting, are preserved by perishing, and revived by dying; and can we think that man, the lord of all these things which thus

die and revive for him, should be so detained in death as never to live again ?" 1

There are three kinds of vision: (1) ocular, by which we see material visible things; (2) intellectual, by which memory, reason, imagination, discerns; (3) spiritual, by which the angelic, supernatural, Divine is realized. All these mutually aid and confirm one another. Material things are proof of greater unseen realities. The intellect, as if touched by electricity, arranges all things, visible and invisible, into a logical system. The soul possesses those faculties by which we rise from the finite to the infinite; and see those mysteries and powers of which the intellect can only think. We say, with Eliphaz the Temanite, "A spirit passed before my face; the hair of my flesh stood up: it stood still, but I could not discern the form thereof" (Job iv. 15, 16). In men, like St. Peter, it is the power of discerning a spiritual, bodily, present Godhead (Matt. xvi. 15-17). It is an intuition of angels' ministry (Heb. i. 14). It is that by which we come "to God the Judge of all, and to the spirits of just men made perfect" (Heb. xii. 22-24). It is that by which St. John beheld innumerable angels (Rev. vii. 14-17). If you think rightly of the high visions that come to poets, like Milton; to artists, like Michael Angelo and Rembrandt; to astronomers, like Newton and the Herschels; you will have views of things and worlds, of states and powers, that belong to eternal worlds and to immortal life.

We do not take a leap into the dark. Where the intellectual powers are barely unfolded, as amongst 1 Pearson on the Creed, art. xi.

savage tribes, the light does indeed appear to be extremely faint; but we need not make ourselves savages. If we remember that "all things are double one against the other" (Ecclus. xliii. 24); the eye is made for light, and light for the eye; and all things so for another that they mutually fit; we come to that principle on which every argument may be surely placed-" What is good is true." 1 If we believe in the good, we shall soon know the true; for though we cannot make ourselves believe, and, therefore, are not wholly responsible for our faith; yet, as we can enforce attention, and rational belief depends on evidence; we can, by due attention, obtain the evidence that leads to faith in the future; and so are responsible, both as to belief and unbelief, and for the account to be given in that future.

Disciplined scientific imagination has always gone in advance of reason, and of known fact; but comes again to reason, that her logic, her experiment, may give verification. Imagination said, "There are worlds. besides that which we live in." Reason and Research, in our astronomers, applied telescopes to the sky; saw and counted fifty millions of worlds, all greater and more splendid than the earth. Imagination declared, "The seen is only a small part of the unseen;" the microscope proves it to be so. Again, Reason and Research arranged duly prepared photographic plates, in the Paris Observatory, and traces were found of worlds beyond worlds in space so distant that even light coming from them, and from those yet beyond, requires a time almost exceeding time. Reason confirms the thought of Imagination, that eternity is required to 1 Bacon's "Advancement of Learning," p. 62.

reveal all that is in infinity, the eternity being given by the Eternal

Thus scientific imagination reveals an infinity within every infinitesimal; a science in the flowers beyond all that we know of their structure, their beauty, their fragrance; a science of religion; a revelation that the voice of God, heard in the secret places of the heart, is not less an utterance of love, than the creation and beautifying of the universe is an unfolding of wisdom and power. By this Love, flowing into our being from the Fountain of all Being, the imperfection of our nature finds perfection in Him. In His works, we apprehend His Greatness. In His Love,

dwelling within us, we discern that physical knowledge, assured by experiment, typifies sacred science, verified by experience. In that experience we revel, the Love of God being shed abroad in our hearts. Because of this love, we endeavoured to fathom the mysteries of unbelief; were, in sympathy and mental struggles, companions of men chained in the narrow cells of dark misery; went whither others would not or could not come; and knew, on the burial morn of those already nailed in coffin, that they were not separated from that Divine love of Christ, which made Him, whom no suffering could assail, give Himself a victim to sorrow; and, whom Death could lay no hand on, subject Himself to that hand. It is this scientific conception of Religion, the highest and most experimental of the sciences, that brings Divine Hope to throw her beautiful arch over that future which unbelieving men paint so black.