rought me
out. I know now that it was a personal relation I was in to it,
because of late years the power of communicating with it has left me,
and I am conscious of a perfectly definite loss. I used never to fail
to find it when I turned to it. Then came a set of years when
sometimes I found it, and then again I would be wholly unable to make
connection with it. I remember many occasions on which at night in
bed, I would be unable to get to sleep on account of worry. I turned
this way and that in the darkness, and groped mentally for the familiar
sense of that higher mind of my mind which had always seemed to be
close at hand as it were, closing the passage, and yielding support,
but there was no electric current. A blank was there instead of IT: I
couldn't find anything. Now, at the age of nearly fifty, my power of
getting into connection with it has entirely left me; and I have to
confess that a great help has gone out of my life. Life has become
curiously dead and {65} indifferent; and I can now see that my old
experience was probably exactly the same thing as the prayers of the
orthodox, only I did not call them by that name. What I have spoken of
as 'It' was practically not Spencer's Unknowable, but just my own
instinctive and individual God, whom I relied upon for higher sympathy,
but whom somehow I have lost."

Nothing is more common in the pages of religious biography than the way
in which seasons of lively and of difficult faith are described as
alternating. Probably every religious person has the recollection of
particular crisis in which a directer vision of the truth, a direct
perception, perhaps, of a living God's existence, swept in and
overwhelmed the languor of the more ordinary belief. In James Russell
Lowell's correspondence there is a brief memorandum of an experience of
this kind:--

"I had a revelation last Friday evening. I was at Mary's, and
happening to say something of the presence of spirits (of whom, I said,
I was often dimly aware), Mr. Putnam entered into an argument with me
on spiritual matters. As I was speaking, the whole system rose up
before me like a vague destiny looming from the Abyss. I never before
so clearly felt the Spirit of God in me and around rue. The whole room
seemed to me full of God. The air seemed to waver to and fro with the
presence of Something I knew not what. I spoke with the calmness and
clearness of a prophet. I cannot tell you what this reve