An illustration has been given: Matter is glove, and when two gloved hands clasp we may, in common language, say that the gloves clasp; but glove is inert matter only; it has no clasping power; the living, flexile, forceful hand within the inert glove does the clasping. When matter acts on soul through the senses, it is not matter acting, but the living hand, the flexile force within it; that living hand, that flexile force, is the supersensible reality, is God. Accordingly, "when matter and a soul to which the Divine will has given individuality influence each other, we have a gloved hand, matter, meeting (clasping) an ungloved hand, the soul. You say that the glove presses on the ungloved hand. What you mean is that the hand in the glove presses the hand that is without the glove." All molecular activity is here regarded as the pulsations of the Divine will. Hence the solar heat shoots its radiant undulations against our bodies, and thereby its ether-tremors are changed to molecular tremors of the nerve tissue, in which form of molecular force the Divine hand within the nervous glove presses the soul, which responds with sensation, called heat. Heat here is a mode of motion of the Divine energy. "It is but reasonable," says Herschel, "to regard gravity as the present effort of a will." So "our earth's motion must, at this moment, originate in a mind." Just so the gliding of the boys' sleds down hill is the present pull of the immanent Deity. And apples fall from the trees by the direct drawings of Divine energy. Secondary causes are put aside as fictions of human misunderstanding and misnaming. In a bit of pulverized tobacco plant, which, as matter, is inert glove, but the supersensible reality, the Divine living force within it, sends a molecular tremor along the olfactory nerve up to the gray, cellular nervetissue of the brain, and there presses the soul in the pungency of a pinch of snuff. In the carbon compound called alcohol, whose precise quantitative atomic combination is, as Lotze suggests, a "profound expression" of the Divine will, and whose mind-affecting property is as directly an act of that will as the prophetic inspiration of Hebrew prophet, the peculiar stimulus communicates an exhilarating tremor to the nervous centers, which pressure of the Divine hand within that carbon glove, the soul receives as an intoxication.. The peculiar alcoholic force in the juice of the grape, which force is the sup

ersensible reality at the core of it, presses the human personality till it reels in drunkenness. The living hand within the glove of grapes may so act on soul that the reason will abdicate its throne of judgment, and the passions will begin to flame luridly from within, or the sentiments soften into maudlin sympathies. Shall we then say that a drunken man is God-intoxicated? For "all the phenomena of the material universe are the results of the immediate Divine agency," said Descartes, Malebranche, Berkeley, Samuel Clarke; and so says Professor Bowen, Professor of Metaphysics in Harvard University. And while others of this school are more moderate, yet they assert that all the molecular, quantitative organic and crystalline collocations of matter are produced immediately by direct acts of the Divine will. It is the ever-present, evercontinuously creative, sustaining, and destructive Deity, the omnipresent, omnipotent Under-soul, that is in inert matter as its present force, and through dead, inert matter touches and acts on the soul, which in its turn determines the sensations of heat, pungency, and intoxication.

We are not responsible for these statements. They are only the logical inferences of the fundamental statements of a doctrine which, once accepted, the face and footsteps are set inevitably downward toward pantheism. The only relief and safety are in the assertion of three existing things-matter, force and mind-and of the fact of second causes, with the Deity distinct from nature, yet personally sustaining and presiding over it in such a way as to meet the special needs of his creatures or the ends of his government.

One of the most interesting points of idealistic dualism lies in the birth of souls, and incidentally in the propagation of species. The birth or origin of the individual soul is no longer much of a mystery, for God is assumed as the omnipresent, sole, creative agency in the extended world of germinal or bioplasmic matter. And the conditions attendant upon the formation of an embryo are just those which determine the immanent God to the production of an individual soul, in the same way that an organic sense-impression determines the soul to the production of a sensation. Now, on this latter point physi ology teaches that in an act of vision a molecular tremor may be supposed to pass up the optic nerve to the brain, and there

to be converted by the soul into a fact of consciousness. In like manner the motion of the vibrating air is passed through the hearing mechanism into the auditory nerve, up which it passes to the brain, and is there determined by the mind as a sound sensation. The organic sense-impressions are the conditions that determine the soul to the production of the sensation; just so, we are told, the conditions that attend the formation of the physiological germ of a human organism determine the substantial reason of the world, or the "unseen Holy," to the production of an individual soul. Just as the brightness of the divine glory in the days of the Jewish tabernacle in the wilderness pervaded the holy of holies and fell over all the objects therein, so God pervades and hovers over all germinal matter, from low sponge and prone fish up to erect man; and just when the bioplasmic matter has by fertilization passed into a perfect physiological organism, then the immanent Creative Power breathes into it the breath of its peculiar life. Just as light, falling on the optic sense-organ, determines the soul to the production of vision, so the perfect germ of a physiological organism determines the great Under-soul to the production of an individual soul. The cruel, licentious Nero derived from Agrippina, his mother, the features of body indicative of excessive animal passion, for which she herself had become infamously famous, and the immanent Deity, from whom come all individual souls, as fire kindles other fires, breathed into that sensual body the breath of a spirit-life loaded on the side of self and cruelty as heavily as the body was on the basely sensual side. We are told that Lotze would not have us think of the immaterial world, the unseen Holy beyond us, as separated from the material universe, but that each individual soul originates in God, who is omnipresent, and where he is there is the capability of creation. The physical and mental identity of parent and child are by this theory referred to the immanent Deity, as the great Dynamis, the Absolute, from whose exhaustless power and substance the soul comes as direct as heat and light from lightning flash, as immediate as flashing spark from smitten steel.

The scientific doctrine of heredity, which states that strong mental impressions exert a special influence on an organism in the embryonic stage of life, must, by Lotze's theory, be referred, not to the parental mind, but to the Divine. The strong passions,

the peculiar traits, which the law of heredity transfers down the line of genetic descent, are passed from parent to child by the great Under-soul, in whom all nature is spiritualized, and from whom all souls are as closely and immediately derived as bud and blossom and fruit from the branch. In Mr. Cook's lecture on Heredity" an Irish woman is referred to, who fiercely, intensely, steadily hated another woman. After a daughter was born the cause of that hatred was removed, but that daughter grew up unlike the other children, and was so devoid of the kindlier feelings that she would plunge a knife with girlish glee into the body of a sister, and feel no regret for the act. We would say that the fierce, persistent hating mood of the mother had passed by heredity over to the child; but Lotze, the accredited advocate of this form of dualistic theism, would say, When God created the bioplasmic matter to be used as the basis of that individual life called the Irish woman's daughter, then he locked with it that immaterial, hard, ungloved hand, the heartless soul. For every human soul, he affirms, comes directly from the exhaustless substance of the Absolute.

It is difficult to see how the question of human responsibility can be fully or fairly met by the philosophy that thus identifies the ongoings of nature with modes of the Divine mind, and that affirms that, apart from God's immediate energizing, there is no vision, no hearing, no birth of soul, no formation of body, no start of crystallization, no motion of masses of matter, no union of chemical substances, no formative power of any thing.

Not many men are idealists, even of a moderate kind. The physical side of things is that with which they have most to do, and of which they will think and feel most. Above them, about them, through them roll the ever-active currents of physical law. Sense and thought are largely filled by it. Accordingly let them be taught to believe that natural law and God are one; let them believe that the growth and death and fall of the season's leaves are as direct a putting forth of divine power as the withering and death of the fig-tree cursed by the Son of Man, save that the one was a momentary, supernatural act, and the other is a prolonged supernatural; let them place the inherited mental wickedness and imbecility, as well as their opposites, to the account of God's direct, personal gifts to man; let them regard miasmas creating pestilence as radia

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tions of the Divine Immanency, as wasting javelins shot fresh from his quiver; let them believe that close behind the curtain of a storm, as close as driving hammer to driven nail, sits the Divine power, shooting the lightning gleams as directly as he flashed the light about the footsteps of the persecuting Saul; let them be taught that only mind and matter exist, and, therefore, the universe is not so much the garment as the living body of God, and that all its changes and activities are his momentary or prolonged volitions; let these thoughts and beliefs hold them, then inevitably the doctrine of the Divine Transcendency will weaken and fade away, and the Divine Immanency will push it back, eloud it over, and crowd it down into the region of tradition or philosophic vagary. mind of average imaginative capacity the Divine Transcendency will not long be held. Its occasional devotional trances, its gleaming, swiftly-passing poetic visions, its religious fervors kindled by transient mystic fires, will become fewer in number and weaker in force, and sooner or later suffer hopeless, helpless shipwreck on the restless sea of the daily passing physical experiences. On the other hand, the Divine Immanency, as the active, controlling Principle of the universe, as the omnipresent Dynamis, as the immediate Energy back of the physical experiences, crowding out the distinction of second causes, and the belief in physical force as distinct from divine volition, will then pass, with an easy and dangerous incline, down into the confusions, the limitations, and the contradictions of pantheism.

ART. IV. THE FRENCH REFORMED CHURCH: ITS SYNOD OF 1872, AND SUBSEQUENT EVENTS.

[FIRST ARTICLE.]

THE prominent official position accorded to Protestants of eminent ability under the Third Republic, and the manifest movement of active minds in France, hitherto reckoned as Catholics or Freethinkers, toward Protestantism during the past two years, awaken a lively and hopeful interest in the fortunes of the French Reformed Church. To any proper