“What has reform in religion ever been other than the demolition of the interfering barriers, the deposit of the past, between man and God?  The theory of the office of the Holy Spirit in the Church expresses man’s need of direct contact with the divine; the doctrine of transubstantiation symbolizes it; and what is Puritanism in all ages, affirming the pure spirit, denying all forms, but the heart of man in his loneliness, seeking God face to face? what is its iconoclasm of image and altar, of prayer-book and ritual, of the Councils and the Fathers, but the assertion of the noble dignity in each individual soul by virtue of which it demands a freeman’s right of audience, a son’s right of presence with his father, and believes that such is God’s way with his own?  This immediacy of the religious life, being once accepted as the substance of vitality in it, relieves man at once of the greater mass of that burden in which scepticism thrives and labours.  The theories of the past respecting God’s government, no longer possible in a humaner and Christianized age, the impaired genuineness of the Scriptures and all questions of their text and accuracy, even the great doctrine of miracles, cease to be of vital consequence.  A man may approach divine truth without them.  Simple and bare as the spiritual life here presented is, it is not open to such sceptical attack, being the fundamental revelation of God bound up in the very nature of man which has been recognized at so many critical times, in so many places and ages, as the inward light.  We may safely leave dogma and historical criticism and scientific discovery on one side; it is not in them that man finds this inward wisdom, but in the religious emotions as they naturally arise under the influence of life.

“This view is supported rather than weakened by such records of the spiritual life in man as we possess.  Man’s nature is one; and, just as it is interpreted and illuminated by the poets from whom we derive direction in our general conduct, it is set forth and illustrated by saintly men and holy women in the special sphere of the soul’s life with God.  Our nature is one with theirs; but as there are differences in the aptitudes, sensibilities, and fates of all men, so is it with spiritual faculties and their growth; and, from time to time, men have arisen of such intense nature, so sensitive to religious emotions, so developed in religious experience, through instinct, circumstance, and power, that they can aid us by the example and precept of their lives.  To them belongs a respect similar to that paid to poets and thinkers.  Yet it is because they tell us what they have seen and touched, not what they have heard,—­what they have lived and shown forth in acts that bear testimony to their words, that they have this power.  Such were St. Augustine, St. Francis of Assisi, St. Thomas a Kempis, and many a humbler name whose life’s story has come into our hands; such were the Apostles, and, preeminently,