appeal to its own practical security of belief. On this it stands, and stands effectively. It ignores the metaphysical difficulties. They simply do not touch or affect it. It goes on, as if they were not there. And it is absolutely right to do so. It is dealing with facts; and it must take the facts as they are. It cannot, in its character as Science, go behind them, or vex itself with the preliminary problem, how there came to be any facts there at all for it to handle; or how it became aware of them and of its capacity to deal with them.
Only, if this is its own practical method of arriving at certainty, it cannot deny the right of Religion to use the same method. For Religion is a Science, a Science of fact. It claims that certain conditions are present and active, here and now; that certain things happen; that certain powers are at play; that certain possibilities are actually open; that a certain contact with the facts wins a certain response; that certain events, in this world of spiritual fact, have a real and direct bearing on man's life and behaviour. God has done certain things. To experience what He has done is Religion. These facts of the spiritual world are as coherent and solid as the facts of the natural world. And they are to be known in the same way. The principles, methods, and rules which hold good in the natural world will hold good here also. For both worlds are on the same lines. 'They are double one against the other.' Trust the same methods by which you have organized your natural experience, and they will justify themselves in this other department. Did you act there on gathered hints, on dim suggestions, on expectations, on tentative experiments, on implied correspondences, on a variety of converging probabilities which only grew into certainties as your experience took them up, and made ventures upon them, and found that, by the venture, it advanced? Is that the invariable type of your activities in contact with facts, in your natural existence? Well, then, why be surprised if you have to repeat exactly the like process in Religion; if here, too, you have to feel
