as the all of Nature. But they were not
content to believe that it was the "all of Being." The latter
conception would have said "No" to certain desires of the heart which
refuse to be negatived,--desires which are as large and lofty as they
are pure and deep: and in order to provide a refuge for these,
men added to their belief in a natural world which was bounded
by the horizon of experience (as they understood the word), the
complementary belief in a world which transcended the limits of
experience, and in which the dreams and hopes for which Nature could
make no provision might somehow or other be realised and fulfilled.
With the development of physical science, the conception of the
Supernatural has become discredited, and a materialistic monism has
begun to dispute the supremacy of that dualistic philosophy which had
reigned without a rival for many hundreds of years. But antagonistic
as these philosophies are to one another, they have one conception in
common. The popular belief that the world of man's normal experience
is the Alpha and Omega of _Nature_, is the very platform on which
their controversies are carried on. Were any one to suggest to them
that this belief was without foundation, that there was room and to
spare in Nature for the "supernatural" as well as for the normal,
that the supernatural world (as it had long been miscalled) was
nothing more nor less than "la continuation occulte de la Nature
infinie,"--they would at once unite their forces against him, and
assail him with an even bitterer hatred than that which animates them
in their own intestine strife.

The dualistic philosophy which satisfied the needs of the West for
some fifteen centuries was systematised and formulated for it, in the
language of myth and poetry, by an Eastern people. The acceptance of
official Christianity by the Graeco-Roman world was the result of
many causes, two of which stand out as central and supreme. The first
of these was the personal magnetism of Christ, in and through which
men came in contact with, and responded to, the attractive forces of
those moral and spiritual ideas which Christ set before his
followers. The second was the readiness of the Western mind to accept
the philosophy of Israel,--a philosophy with the master principles of
which it had long been subconsciously familiar, and for the clear and
convincing presentation of which it had long been waiting. Of the
personal magnetism of Christ and the pa