uture, not in the decrees of councils, nor in the
records of past time.

Inspiration, in its religious sense, we may, therefore, define to be
that condition of mind in which the truths relating to deity and duty
become in whole or in part the subjects of immediate perception.

That such a condition is possible will be granted. Every reformer who
has made a permanent betterment in the religion of his time has
possessed it in some degree. He who first conceived the Kosmos under
logical unity as an orderly whole, had it in singular power; so too had
he who looking into the mind became aware of its purposive laws which
are the everlasting warrants of duty. Some nations have possessed it in
remarkable fulness, none more so than the descendants of Abraham, from
himself, who left his kindred and his father's house at the word of God,
through many eminent seers down to Spinoza, who likewise forsook his
tribe to obey the inspirations vouchsafed him; surpassing them all,
Jesus of Nazareth, to whose mind, as he waxed in wisdom, the truth
unfolded itself in such surpassing clearness that neither his immediate
disciples nor any generations since have fathomed all the significance
of his words.

Such minds do not need development and organic transmission of thought
to enrich their stores. We may suppose the organization of their brains
to be so perfect that their functions are always accordant with true
reasoning, so self-prompting, that a hint of the problem is all they ask
to arrive at its demonstration. Blaise Pascal, when a boy of twelve,
whose education had been carefully restrained, once asked his father
what is geometry. The latter replied that it is a method devised to draw
figures correctly, but forbade any further inquiry about it. On this
hint Pascal, by himself, unassisted, without so much as knowing the name
of a line or circle, reached in a few weeks to the demonstration of the
thirty-second problem of the first book of Euclid! Is it not possible
for a mind equally productive of religious truth to surpass with no less
ease its age on such subjects?

As what Newton so well called "patient thought," constant application,
prolonged attention, is the means on which even great minds must rely in
order to reach the sempiternal verities of science, so earnest continued
prayer is that which all teachers prescribe as the only avenue to
inspiration in its religious sense. While this may be conceded,
collaterals of the prayer