und. God is no longer an inference
from final causes, nor a principle of thought. He is the living God, a
real personal spirit with whom the soul is permitted to hold direct
communion. Providence becomes the act of a personal agent. Religion is the
worship in spirit. Sin is seen in its heinousness. Prayer is justified as
a reality, as the breathing of the human soul for communion with its
infinite Parent (8). And by the light of this intuition, God, nature, and
man, look changed. Nature is no longer a physical engine; man no longer a
moral machine. Material nature becomes the regular expression of a
personal fixed will; Miracle the direct interposition of a personal free
will. Revelation is probable, as the voice of God's mercy to the child of
His love. Inspiration becomes possible, for the intuitional consciousness
seems adapted to be used by divine Providence as its instrument.(104)

But the type of mind created by the use of intuition as a test of truth is
rarely alone. It is cognate to, if it is not connected with, that produced
by the third of the above-named tests, feeling. The emotions, according to
a law of spiritual supply and demand, suggest the reality of the objects
toward which they are aspirations. The longing for help, the feeling of
dependence, is the justification of prayer; the sense of remorse is the
witness to divine judgment; the consciousness of penitence is the ground
for hope in God's merciful interference; the ineradicable sense of guilt
is the eternal witness to the need of atonement; the instinct for
immortality is the pledge of a future life.

Yet the use of these tests of intuition and feeling in religion, though
possessing these advantages, has dangers. If the feelings, instead of
being used to reinforce or check the other faculties, be relied upon as
sole arbiters; especially if they be linked with the imagination instead
of the intuition; they may conduct to mysticism and superstition by the
very vividness of their perception of the supernatural.(105) Likewise the
intuitive faculty, if it be regarded as giving a noble grasp over the fact
of God as an infinite Spirit, may cause the mind to relax its hold on the
idea of the Divine Personality, and fall into Pantheism, and identify God
with the universe, not by degrading spirit to matter, but by elevating
matter to spirit.(106) Or, instead of allowing experience and revelation
to develop into conceptions of the fundamental truth whose existen