those just mentioned, are defended or condoned, we must infer either spiritual degradation or the abortion of the higher faculties of the soul. These grovellers suppose that because they are numerous they are not mad: they take it for granted that the crowd is sane. If you will not read Epictetus, go ponder that "solennia insanire" of Horace. It is indeed unlikely that you will appreciate the “Stoic majesty of mind."

Fifth: To those only who have attempted to realise the earlier ideals, the supreme ideal, fraternity, is revealed. Not they are comrades who have certain hopes and fears in common, but they who share the great ideals. Eadem velle et eadem nolle, Catiline's famous definition applies well enough to that low "comradeship which may exist among brigands or swine of the same sty. But idealists must meet upon a higher level. The individual is mystically united to humanity, devoted to the service of mankind, as the ghazi or berserk to the service of his clan. These have learnt the common language of nature, they feel a sense of kinship with all sentient beings. Rarely is this ideal reached except through much suffering and sorrow (Acts xiv. 22). Known only by their lives are the numbers of this confraternity, for this stage, like the last, is private.

Christ represented this phase of Religion as the grafting of a vine upon a stock which is humanity and the parable may suggest the

vine-leaf as a symbol here. The spirit of fraternity is embodied in the very beautiful hymn of Ugo Bassi, reported by Harriet King in her inspired poem, The Disciples.

This stage and the last, depending on intuition and love, form what Christians call the "Gospel Dispensation," that is to say, the higher or esoteric part of Religion. For the intuition of abstract beauty is a higher faculty than reason, and love will carry a man farther than conscience. Jacob served seven years for his first wife, and for the second he worked another seven. Let the lower religion of conscience and reason be to you as Leah let Rachel represent that of intuition and love. Rest not till you have won them both.

Sixth: There is a yet higher stage, the theistic; the coping - stone of idealism as it seems to us, but unessential to Religion. Only the great saints and heroes can reach this level. To them it is given to enter the "holy of holies," the sanctum sanctorum of the temple. They have the "spirit of adoption" (Romans viii. 15); they enjoy the "heavenly vision," those commercia coeli of which the poet speaks. To us theism is a theory which we accept because there is (for us) no other solution to the sphinx-riddle of the universe: but to the Great and Good ones, to Epictetus, to Socrates, Aurelius, Christ, Spinosa, God is an intense reality, the only reality. Their souls, unclouded

by sin and vice, are able to ascend into a higher sphere.

The pathway to this region does not lie through contemplation or meditation or asceticism, nor yet through prayer and "spiritual exercises" of any kind, but through fraternity and the service of man. Speaking in the name of humanity, as every honest man may do, Christ says, "No man can come to the Father but by me." text is by far the most important one between the covers of the Bible, for if rightly understood it would reverse the whole current of religious thought and put an end to the make-believe which now mocks at Heaven.

This

The Seventh and last stage is not yet it is to come. This is the "Kingdom of Heaven," the higher life, the aim of all existence, the imago of our present larval state. This is the "peace that is promised to the saints," the ' rest that remains for the people of God," the result of this life's misery and suffering, the outcome of the "great renunciation." Not nirvana, but activity; service and usefulness without competition and strife; progress without relapse; life not based upon the destruction of other life, and therefore undarkened by the shadow of death.

The first of these seven stages is that of Kingship, for he is king who rules himself. Priesthood answers to the second and third: the exoteric or lower doctrines of Religion reached

The Prophetic

through conscience and reason. stages are the fourth and fifth, attained by intuition and by love. Thus the follower of the Great and Good is, like them, "Prophet, Priest, and King."

In the Chambered Nautilus, one of the noblest Psalms which the nineteenth century has produced, O. W. Holmes associates the spiral shell with the progressive development of the human soul. This is the last verse:

"Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul,

As the swift seasons roll.

Leave thy low-vaulted past!

Let each new temple, nobler than the last,

Shut thee from Heaven with a dome more vast:

Till thou at length art free,

Leaving thine out-grown shell by life's unresting sea."

The spiral might well serve as a symbol of Progress "putting us in remembrance of the commandment of God's law."

You may not omit one single step in the ascending series. The evangelical "conversion" aims at the fourth stage while ignoring the third, and is therefore a mere vulgar profanation, all the worse because it makes public a matter which should be private. The churchman's eucharist is a bid for fraternity without the preparatory stages which make brotherhood possible. It is therefore nugatory: a hollow, grinning mockery.

Religion is concerned with Ideals, Morality

with Virtues. The following are the Higher Attributes of the Soul (called by materialists functions of the brain), with allied Ideals and Virtues.

N.B.-Details and distinctions such as that between the Intellectual and Emotional Faculties are here disregarded. By Intuition is meant that faculty which is immediately cognisant of first principles.

Lower Instincts of the Soul.

These are

legitimate; they are common to all animals. They may not be crushed or got rid of or