a love that has not concentrated itself through limitation upon any instrumental conversion of the world; but, inchoate as they are, they remain faith, hope, love—­these 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 the life itself, then only is that direct relation of man with God, this vital certainty in living truth,—­living in us,—­this personal religion, possible.