to all below it, can only be the moral nature, whose full
satisfaction is necessary to the highest satisfaction of a man, and in
whose complete development only can be realized in permanency his
perfected welfare as a social being.

Now it is precisely in the progress of moral development that
supernatural Religion manifests itself as a reality. Religion, indeed,
is as natural to man as Art. But there is religion and Religion, as
there is art and Art--the sexual religion of the primitive Semites, the
animistic religion of China, the spiritual Religion that flowered on the
Mount of the Beatitudes, embryonic religion and Religion adult; all,
indeed, natural, yet of lower and of higher grade. Doubtless, Religion
of whatever grade outranks all other human activities by its distinctive
aspiration to transcend the bounds of space and time and sense, and to
link the individual to the universal; and so all Religion sounds, feebly
or distinctly, the note of the supernatural. But this is the resonant
note of the spiritual Religion which unfolds in the moral progress of
the world. As moral nature is supernatural to the psychical and the
physical, so is its consummate bloom of spiritual Religion to be ranked
as such, relatively to the religions which more or less dimly and
blindly are yearning and groping toward the light that never was on sea
or land. Thus defining the word according to the nature of the thing,
supernatural Religion, with its corollary of supernatural Revelation not
as an apparition from without, but as an unfolding from within, is both
a fact and a factor in the development of spiritual man.

The term _supernatural Religion_ has been rightly applied to that system
of religious conceptions, ideals, and motives, whose effective culture
of the moral nature is attested historically by a moral development
superior to the product of any other known religion. Whether the
greatest saints of Christianity are all of them whiter souls than any
that can be found among the disciples of any other religion, may be
matter for argument. There can be no gainsaying the fact that, of great
and lowly together, no other religion shows so many saints, or has so
advanced the general moral development in lands where it is widely
followed. But its essential character has been obscured, its appeal to
man's highest nature foiled, and its power lamed by the wretched fallacy
that has transferred its distinctive note of the supernatural from i