meets us again and again in different ages and in widely distant parts of the world. Its genesis is very clear. Something not merely human, or something superhuman, was discovered at a very early time in parents and ancestors, particularly after they had departed this life. Their names were preserved, their memory was honoured, their sayings were recorded, and assumed very soon the authority of law. As the recollection of fathers, grandfathers, greatgrandfathers and still more distant ancestors became vaguer and vaguer, their names were surrounded by a dim religious light. The ancestors, no longer merely human, approached more and more to the superhuman, and this is not far removed from the divine.

Offerings, such as had been presented to the gods of nature, were tendered likewise to the ancestral spirits, and when the very natural question arose, who was the ancestor of all ancestors, the father of all fathers, the answer was equally natural,-it could only be the same father, the same creator, the same loving ruler of the universe who had been discovered behind the veil of nature. Dyaus, the sky, and the Supreme God, was now called Dyaush-pitar, Heaven-Futher, in Greek Zeus marýρ, in Latin Ju-piter.

But while in some parts of the world the idea of the primeval father was identified with the idea of the primeval god, it assumed another character among other races, namely that of the first man, the type of all mankind, being god, not as the father, but as the son1, intimately connected with the father, yet

1 St. Luke iii. 38, 'which was the son of Adam, which was the son of God.'

not to be confounded with him. This idea, too, as you will see, arose and grew spontaneously from the soil of our common human nature, and I need not tell you in what religion it has found its fullest expression and most perfect historical realisation.

The third sphere of religious thought is that which I called Psychological, because it is filled with intellectual endeavours after that which lies beyond man, as a self-conscious subject, conscious of self, whatever that self may be. That self has been called by many names in the different languages of the world. It was called breath, ghost, spirit, mind, soul, genius, and many more names which constitute a kind of psychological mythology, full of interest to the student of language and philosophy. It was afterwards called the Ego, or the person, but even these names did not satisfy man, as he became more and more conscious of a higher self. The person was discovered to be a persona only, that is a mask; and even the Ego was but a pronoun, not yet the true noun, the true word which self-unconscious man was in search of. At last the consciousness of self arose from out the clouds of psychological mythology, and became the consciousness of the Infinite or the Divine within us; the individual self found itself again in the Divine Self-not absorbed in it, but hidden in it, and united with it by a half-human and half-divine sonship. We find the earliest name for the Infinite, as discovered by man within himself, in the ancient Upanishads. There it is called Atma, the Self, or Pratyag-âtma, the Self behind, looking towards Paramátmá, the Highest Self. Socrates knew the same Self, but he called it Daimonion, the indwelling God.

The early Christian philosophers called it the Holy Ghost, a name which has received many interpretations and misinterpretations in different schools of theology, but which ought to become again what it was meant for in the beginning, the spirit which unites all that is holy within man with the Holy of Holies, or the Infinite behind the veil of the Ego, or of the merely phenomenal self.

This is but a very imperfect sketch of what I think a complete study of Natural Religion, in its three great branches, ought to be; and though I feel myself far too old and far too incompetent to survey the whole of that immense field of religious thought, I hope that those who follow me in this place will carry out this great work, which requires many labourers and many diverse gifts.

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