of the researches thus started characterised, and criticised.

2. The testimony of consciousness is sufficient to establish the existence of religion as a subjective or mental state, but cannot certify whether, as such, it be simple or complex, primary or derivative, coextensive with human consciousness, or wider or narrower, or whether there be anything objectively corresponding to it.

3. In order to analyse religion, the ultimate genera of consciousness must be ascertained, which has only been slowly done. History of the process: Plato, Aristotle, their followers, Descartes, Spinosa, the English philosophers from Bacon to Dugald Stewart, Kant and the German psychologists, Brown, Hamilton, and Bain. Establishment of the threefold division of mental phenomena into cognitions, emotions, and volitions. Difficulties of the division shown by the author in 'Mind,' No. V.

Religion must be a state of intellect, sensibility, or will, or some combination of two or all of these factors.

4. Religion may be held to consist essentially and exclusively of knowledge; but this mistake is too gross to have been frequently committed.

The Gnostics, the earlier and scholastic theologians, the rationalists, Schelling and Cousin, have been charged with this error. The grounds of the charge indicated. Shown to be in all these cases exaggerated.

5. Schleiermacher refutes the theory by the consideration that the measure of our knowledge is not the measure of our religion.

Vindication and illustration of his argument. Service rendered by Schleiermacher to religion and theology in this connection.

6. Hegel came nearest to the identification of religion and thought, maintaining that sentiment was the lowest manifestation of religion, while the comprehension of the absolute, the highest knowledge, was its complete realisation, as also that religion was the self-consciousness of God through the mediation of the finite spirit.

Exposition and criticism of this theory. Examination of Vera's defence of it. Worship supposes two persons morally and spiritually as well as intellectually related.

7. While no mere intellectual act constitutes religion, the exercise of reason is an essential part of religion.

The denial of this an error prevalent among the modern theologians of Germany, owing to their accepting Kant's argumentation against the possibility of apprehending God by the speculative or pure reason as conclusive. If religion have no rational foundation, it has no real foundation. Reason does not apprehend merely what is finite. True place of reason in religion.

8. Religion has often been resolved into feeling or sentiment, but erroneously, since whatever feeling is fixed on requires some explanation of its existence, and this can only be found in some act or exercise of intellect. 9. Epicurus, Lucretius, and Hume have traced religion. to fear.

10. Fear explains atheism better than it explains religion, and in order even to be feared God must be believed in.

Men fear a great many things. Mere fear founds nothing, but only causes efforts to avoid the presence or thought of its object. Fear enters into religion, and is filial in the higher, and servile in the lower, forms of religion.

II. Feuerbach resolves religion into desire-into an

ignorant and illusive personification of man's own nature as he would wish it to be.

12. This view presupposes the truth of atheism, does not explain why man should refer to supramundane ends or objects, and is contradicted by the historical facts, which show that reason and conscience have at least co-operated with desire in the origination and development of religion.

13. Schleiermacher resolves religion into a feeling of absolute dependence of pure and complete passiveness.

Statement of his theory. Shown to rest on a pantheistic conception of the Divine Being. His reduction of the Divine attributes into power.

14. No such feeling can exist, the mind being incapable of experiencing a feeling of nothingness-a consciousness of unconsciousness.

15. Could it be supposed to exist, it would have no religious character, because wholly blind and irrational.

16. The theory of Schleiermacher makes the moral and religious consciousness subversive of each other, the former affirming and the latter denying our freedom and responsibility.

17. Mansel supposes the religious consciousness to be traceable to the feeling of dependence and the conviction of moral obligation; but the latter feeling implies the perception of moral law, and is not religious unless there be also belief in a moral lawgiver.

18. Schenkel represents conscience as 'the religious organ of the soul,' but this is not consistent with the fact that conscience is the faculty which distinguishes right from wrong.

Schenkel's view of conscience shown to make its religious testimony contradict its ethical testimony.

19. Strauss combines the views of Epicurus, Feuerbach, and Schleiermacher; but three errors do not make a truth.

Account of the criticism to which the Straussian theory of religion has been subjected by Vera, Ulrici, and Professor H. B. Smith.

20. Although there can be no true religion without love, and although to love the true God with the whole heart is the ideal of religion, religion cannot be resolved exclusively into love; since love presupposes knowledge, and is not the predominant feeling, if present at all, in the lower forms of religion.

21. Religion includes will, implying the free and deliberate surrender of the soul to God,—the making self an instrument where it might, although wrongfully, have been made an end,—but it is not merely will, since all volition, properly so called, presupposes reason and feeling.

22. Kant made religion merely a sanction for duty, and duty the expression of a will which is its own law, and which is unaffected by feeling; but this view rested on erroneous conceptions as to (1) the relation of religion and morality, (2) the nature of the will, and (3) the place of feeling in the mental economy.

Religion and morality inseparable in their normal conditions; but not to be identified, religion being communion with God, while morality is conformity to a law which is God's will but which may not be acknowledged to be His will, so that they may and do exist in abnormal forms apart from each other.

The will has not its law in itself. Kant's errors on this subject.

Feeling is the natural and universal antecedent of action. Kant's errors on this subject.

23. Dr Brinton (Religious Sentiment, &c., 1876) analyses religion into emotion and idea-an affective and intellectual element-the latter of which arises necessarily from the law of contradiction and excluded middle.

Merits and defects of his theory.

24. The religious process is at once rational, emotional, and volitional.

Its unity, and the co-operation of knowing, feeling, and willing.

25. Description of (1) its essential contents, (2) its chief forms, (3) its principal moments or stages, and (4) its manifestations in spiritual worship and work.

NOTE VIII., page 58.

ARGUMENT E CONSENSU GENTIUM.

The fact that religion is a natural and universal phenomenon, as widespread as humanity and as old as its history, and the fact insisted on in the lecture, that religion can only realise its proper nature in a theistic form, give us, when adequately established, the modern and scientific statement of the old argument―e consensu gentium. This argument, which we already meet with in Cicero (De Nat. Deor., i. 17; Tusc. Ques., i. 13; De Leg., i. 8) and Seneca (Epist. 117), in Clement of Alexandria (Strom., v. 14) and Lactantius (Div. Inst., i. 2), has gradually grown into the science of comparative theology. An instructive essay might be written on its development.

Mr J. S. Mill, who had obviously no suspicion that