aspect of things has come home to us with a special force; and what really enriches the hope and faith of the world is the experience of candid and sincere persons.  The specialist has often had no time or opportunity to observe life; all he has observed is the thought of other secluded persons, persons whose view has been both narrow and conventional, because they have not had the opportunity of correcting their traditional preconceptions by life itself.

I call, with all the earnestness that I can muster, upon all intelligent, observant, speculative people, who have felt the problems of life weigh heavily upon them, not to be dismayed by the disapproval of technical students, but to come forward and tell us what conclusions they have formed.  The work of the trained specialist is essentially, in religion and philosophy, a negative work.  He can show us how erroneous beliefs, which coloured the minds of men at certain ages and eras, grew up.  He can show us what can be disregarded, as being only the conventional belief of the time; he can indicate, for instance, how a false conception of supernatural interference with natural law grew up in an age when, for want of trained knowledge, facts seemed fortuitous occurrences which were really conditioned by natural laws.  The poet and the idealist make and cast abroad the great vital ideas, which the specialist picks up and analyses.  But we must not stop at analysis; we want positive progress as well.  We want people to tell us, candidly and simply, how their own soul grew, how it cast off conventional beliefs, how it justified itself in being hopeful or the reverse.  There never was a time when more freedom of thought and expression was conceded to the individual.  A man is no longer socially banned for being heretical, schismatic, or liberal-minded.  I want people to say frankly what real part spiritual agencies or religious ideas have played in their lives, whether such agencies and ideas have modified their conduct, or have been modified by their inclinations and habits.  I long to know a thousand things about my fellow-men—­how they bear pain, how they confront the prospect of death, the hopes by which they live, the fears that overshadow them, the stuff of their lives, the influence of their emotions.  It has long been thought, and it is still thought by many narrow precisians, indelicate and egotistical to do this.  And the result is that we can find in books all the things that do not matter, while the thoughts that are of deep and vital interest are withheld.

Such books as Montaigne’s Essays, Rousseau’s Confessions, Mrs. Carlyle’s Letters, Mrs. Oliphant’s Memoirs, the Autobiography of B. R. Haydon, to name but a few books that come into my mind, are the sort of books that I crave for, because they are books in which one sees right into the heart and soul of another.  Men can confess to a book what they cannot confess to a friend.  Why should it be necessary to veil this essence of humanity in the dreary melodrama,