to understand them.  The facts must first be given; they must be actual experiences of the human spirit.  Moral philosophy and theology differ from the moral or religious life, in the same way as geology differs from the earth, or astronomy from the heavenly bodies.  The latter are facts; the former are theories about the facts.  Religion is an attitude of the human spirit towards the highest; morality is the realization of character; and these are not to be confused with their reflective interpretations.  Much of the difficulty in these matters comes from the lack of a clear distinction between beliefs and creeds.

Further, not only are the utterances of the heart prior to the deliverances of the intellect in this sense, but it may also be admitted that the latter can never do full justice to the contents of the former.  So rich is character in content and so complex is spiritual life, that we can never, by means of reflection, lift into clear consciousness all the elements that enter into it.  Into the organism of our experience, which is our faith, there is continually absorbed the subtle influences of our complex natural and social environment.  We grow by means of them, as the plant grows by feeding on the soil and the sunshine and dew.  It is as impossible for us to set forth, one by one, the truths and errors which we have thus worked into our mental and moral life, as it is to keep a reckoning of the physical atoms with which the natural life builds up the body.  Hence, every attempt to justify these truths seems inadequate; and the defence which the understanding sets up for the faith, always seems partial and cold.  Who ever fully expressed his deepest convictions?  The consciousness of the dignity of the moral law affected Kant like the view of the starry firmament, and generated a feeling of the sublime which words could not express; and the religious ecstasy of the saints cannot be confined within the channels of speech, but floods the soul with overmastering power, possessing all its faculties.  In this respect, it will always remain true that the greatest facts of human experience reach beyond all knowledge.  Nay, we may add further, that in this respect the simplest of these facts passes all understanding.  Still, as we have already seen, it is reason that constitutes them; that which is presented to reason for explanation, in knowledge and morality and religion, is itself the product of reason.  Reason is the power which, by interaction with our environment, has generated the whole of our experience.  And, just as natural science interprets the phenomena given to it by ordinary opinion, i.e., interprets and purifies a lower form of knowledge by converting it into a higher; so the task of reason when it is exercised upon morality and religion, is simply to evolve, and amplify the meaning of its own products.  The movement from morality and religion to moral philosophy and the philosophy of religion,