The principle, “Cuique in sua arte credendum est,” applies to those who have been eminent for personal holiness as much as to the leaders in any other branch of excellence.  Even in dealing with arts which are akin to each other, we do not invite poets to judge of music, or sculptors of architecture.  We need not then be disturbed if we occasionally find men illustrious in other fields, who are as insensible to religion as to poetry.  Our reverence for the character and genius of Charles Darwin need not induce us to lay aside either our Shakespeare or our New Testament.[405] The men to whom we naturally turn as our best authorities in spiritual matters, are those who seem to have been endowed with an “anima naturaliter Christiana,” and who have devoted their whole lives to the service of God and the imitation of Christ.

Now it will be found that these men of acknowledged and pre-eminent saintliness agree very closely in what they tell us about God.  They tell us that they have arrived gradually at an unshakable conviction, not based on inference but on immediate experience, that God is a Spirit with whom the human spirit can hold intercourse; that in Him meet all that they can imagine of goodness, truth, and beauty; that they can see His footprints everywhere in nature, and feel His presence within them as the very life of their life, so that in proportion as they come to themselves they come to Him.  They tell us that what separates us from Him and from happiness is, first, self-seeking in all its forms; and, secondly, sensuality in all its forms; that these are the ways of darkness and death, which hide from us the face of God; while the path of the just is like a shining light, which shineth more and more unto the perfect day.  As they have toiled up the narrow way, the Spirit has spoken to them of Christ, and has enlightened the eyes of their understandings, till they have at least begun to know the love of Christ which passeth knowledge, and to be filled with all the fulness of God.

So far, the position is unassailable.  But the scope of the argument has, of course, its fixed limits.  The inner light can only testify to spiritual truths.  It always speaks in the present tense; it cannot guarantee any historical event, past or future.  It cannot guarantee either the Gospel history or a future judgment.  It can tell us that Christ is risen, and that He is alive for evermore, but not that He rose again the third day.  It can tell us that the gate of everlasting life is open, but not that the dead shall be raised incorruptible.  We have other faculties for investigating the evidence for past events; the inner light cannot certify them immediately, though it can give a powerful support to the external evidence.  For though we are in no position to dogmatise about the relations of the temporal to the eternal, one fact does seem to stand out,—­that the two are, for us, bound together.  If, when we read the Gospels,