THIRTY THESES.

I.

God reveals, that is to say, manifests, Himself directly to Mankind, by the Mind: this manifestation addresses itself to Man's rational Conscience, or to the Consciousness of Truth and Goodness. This direct manifestation is that of the Eternal Word or Reason, and is the key to the indirect manifestation of God to Man through the Creation and through History, or through the physical and intellectual Kosmos.

It follows that there can exist no enlightened belief in God, and therefore no sound religious life, without a faith in the corresponding divine element of the soul; and that Christianity can no more co-exist long, individually or nationally, with a materialistic philosophy, than it can with a principle of moral wickedness.

II.

The Soul perceives, by one and the same act, God as absolute Truth and as perfect Goodness; and all religious faith is based upon the conviction that both are one in Him: while in and around himself Man finds both Reason and Conscience involved in antagonisms and apparent contradictions.

The belief in Truth is the supposition from which all reasoning starts; and that in the existence of Goodness is the law and life of conscience. But there is Falsehood and Evil within and without, encumbering and obscuring more or less the Reason and Conscience, and warring against Truth and Goodness. This disharmony and antagonism draw the mind to seek a solution by turning to the first cause of existence: a solution which, as we know, cannot be found except by an act of faith followed by the assent of reason. This act is the acknowledgment of an eternal divine Will of Truth and Goodness, and the willing and thankful submission of self and self-will to that divine Will.

The inability of the Kantian system to show what it postulates, namely, the identity of the true and the good (in pure and in practical reason), is its acknowledged defect. To find a method of demonstrating that such a unity is indeed the supreme law of the reason and the first condition of our forming any notion and acquiring any knowledge, has been since, and must continue to be, the legitimate object of all speculative philosophy, and in particular of the philosophy of the mind.

III.

The contemplation of God in the history of mankind is the most natural and most universal means of strengthening the innate faith of the Soul in its own destiny; because this History is as much the realization of the moral order of the world, as the Universe is of the laws of gravitation and of light.

The law of the universe is a law external to the mind, although man also lives under it; the law of the History of his race is man's own law, that history itself his own history, placed objectively before him, and still as a part of himself. The voice of the conscience within him speaks to his contemplating mind out of the destinies around and before him; and his reason is led by that contemplation to the same results, as objectively true, which he found by self-contemplation. The subjective and the objective element support and supply one another. The history of past ages offers in large characters the solution of much which perplexes him in his own personal observation and experience; and, on the other hand, his inward ideal power enables him to divine the beginning and end hidden in history, and to understand primitive traditions, recollections of the past or of the nature of the soul itself. The microcosm spreads its mental light over the ages of history, and receives light and nourishment from them. Perceiving in all human things a beginning, a progress, a decay, and an end, the mind is able to discern in this development a working of the same laws which man discovers in himself. The laws of Truth and Goodness claim sooner or later their right in history, as they

do in Reason and Conscience; and Falsehood and Evil prove to be destructive to man and society. Has it always been so? Will it ever be so? Is the lot of humanity a common one in all respects?

The more this horizon is enlarged, and the more at the same time the phenomena are referred to their eternal centre-the divine laws of the intellectual and moral Kosmos-the more effectual a vehicle of progressive civilization and true enlightenment historical records will be. They will acquire the character of universality in the same measure as they exhibit humanity; and that of sacredness, the more they manifest the working of those laws as divine, eternal, not conventional or subject to arbitrary individual or national regulations. The highest ideal, therefore, would be such records as considered the whole human race as one as a unity, and as having, like the human soul, the Infinite, as the beginning and the end of its finite existence. Without ceasing to be national, and embodying national peculiarities, such records would have an extra-national element, which would elevate and sanctify even those peculiarities, giving them in their general sense a typical or moral character for the rest of mankind.