ng,
ripening consciousness which comes from personal fellowship with Him.
Philosophy can only say "Know thyself," but Scripture says, "Know God."
This is how wisdom and revelation become ours, and Christian history and
experience testify abundantly to the simple yet remarkable fact of
spiritual insight and moral understanding which are due solely to
fellowship with God. Nothing is more striking than the fact of a deep,
spiritual apprehension and appreciation which are independent of
intellectual conception and verbal expression. Believers can have a true
spiritual consciousness of God without the possession of great capacity or
attainments. Many whose natural education and intellectual opportunities
have been slight have had this spiritual perception in an uncommon degree,
and it always marks the spiritually ripe Christian. It is not the one
whose intellectual knowledge is critical, scholarly, and profound, but he
whose spiritual insight is suffused with grace, love, and fellowship. This
does not mean that natural knowledge or culture is to be despised or
avoided as evil, but that the two kinds of knowledge should be carefully
distinguished. The Christian Church has at least for the last three
hundred years set great store by knowledge and science, but deeper than
all this is the spiritual instinct, insight, knowledge, and illumination
which constitute the supreme requirement of the true Christian life. We
can see this spiritual perception in its various stages in several
passages of the New Testament. We have seen how St. John divides believers
into three classes (1 John ii. 12-14). But while in his repetition the
Apostle can vary the description of the "children" and the "young men,"
when he has to speak the second time of the "fathers" he has nothing new
to say, for they cannot be otherwise or more fully described than as those
who "know Him Who is from the beginning."

(3) The immediate consequence of this fellowship is that the eyes of the
heart become permanently enlightened (Greek). Keeping in view the
Scripture truth of the "heart" as including the elements of Mind,
Emotion, and Will, the result of fellowship with God is that every feature
of the inner life becomes purified and enlightened. The mind is
illuminated to perceive truth, the emotions are purified to love the good,
and the will is equipped to obey the right. It is not that new objects
meet the gaze so much as that a new and deeper perception is given t