with sets to work to justify it. "Now what is this subconscious mind whose importance is so great and of whose nature we know so little? That is a question upon which psychology has not yet pronounced, but there are not a few who regard it as the real personality. Evidently it is not only deeper but larger than the surface mind. Our discovery of its existence has taught us that our ordinary consciousness is but a tiny corner of our personality. It has been well described as an illuminated disk on a vast ocean of being; it is like an island in the Pacific which is really the summit of a mountain whose base is miles below the surface. Summit and base are one, and yet no one realizes when standing on the little island that he is perched at the very top of a mountain peak. So it is with our everyday consciousness of ourselves; we find it rather difficult to realize that this consciousness is not all there is of us. And yet, when we come to examine into the facts, the conclusion seems irresistible, that of our truer, deeper being we are quite unconscious."

"Several important inferences follow from this position. The first is that our surface consciousness is somewhat illusory and does not possess the sharpness and definiteness of outline which we are accustomed to take for granted when thinking of ourselves. To ordinary common sense nothing seems more obvious than that we know most that is to be known about our friend John Smith . . . But according to the newer psychology, this matter-of-fact Englishman is not what he seems even to himself. His true being is vastly greater than he knows, and vastly greater than the world will ever know. It belongs not to the material plane of existence but to the plane of eternal reality. This larger self is in all probability a perfect and eternal spiritual being integral to the being of God. His surface self, his Philistine self, is the incarnation of some portion of that true eternal self, which is one with God. The dividing line between the surface self and the other self is not the definite demarcation it appears to be. To the higher self it does not exist ...If my readers want to know whether I think that the higher self is conscious of the lower, I can only answer, yes, I do, but I cannot prove it; probabilities point that way. What I want to insist on here is that we are greater than we seem, that we have a higher self, and that our limited consciousness does not involve a separate individuality.

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting;
The Soul that rises with us, our life's star,

Hath had elsewhere its setting,

And cometh from afar.

Not in entire forgetfulness,

And not in utter nakedness,

But trailing clouds of glory do we come

From God who is our home.

The greatest poets are the best theologians after all, for they see the farthest. The true being is consciousness; the universe, visible and invisible, is consciousness. The higher self of the individual infolds more of the consciousness of God than the lower, but lower and higher are the same thing.

"Another inference from the theory of the subconscious mind is that of the fundamental unity of the whole human race. Indeed all life is fundamentally one, but there is a kinship of man with man which precedes that of man with any other order of being. Here again the spiritual truth cuts across what seem to be the dictates of common sense. Common sense assumes that I and Thou are eternally distinct, and that by no possibility can the territories of our respective beings ever become one. But even now, and on mere everyday grounds, we are finding reason to think otherwise . All being, remember, is conscious of being. The infinite consciousness sees itself as a whole; the finite consciousness sees the same whole as a part. Ultimately your being and mine are one and we shall come to know it. Individuality only has meaning in relation to the whole, and individual consciousness can only be fulfilled by expanding until it embraces the whole. Nothing that exists in your consciousness now and constitutes your self-knowledge will ever be obliterated or ever can be, but in a higher state of existence you will realize it to be a part of the universal stock. I shall not cease to be I, nor you to be you; but there must be a region of experience where we shall find that you and I are one.

"A third inference, already hinted at and presumed in all that has gone before, is that the highest of all selves, the ultimate Self of the universe, is God. The New Testament speaks of man as body, soul, and spirit. The body is the thought-form through which the individuality finds expression on our present limited plane; the soul is a man's consciousness of himself as apart from all the rest of existence and even from God—it is the bay seeing itself as the bay and not as the ocean; the spirit is the true being thus limited and expressed—it is the deathless divine within us. The soul therefore is what we make it; the spirit we can neither make nor mar, for it is at once our being and God's. Where, then, someone will say, is the dividing line between our being and God's? There is no dividing line except on our side. The ocean of consciousness knows that the bay has never been separate from itself, although the bay is only conscious of the ocean on the outer side of its being."

So far the teaching of The New Theology in its universal aspect. Let us now turn to its view of the character and position of Jesus. In

a sense, says our author, everything that exists is divine, because the whole universe is an expression of the being of God. But it is well to restrict the word "divine" to the kind of consciousness which knows itself to be, and rejoices to be, the expression of a love which is a consistent self-giving to the universal life. "God is love; and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God and God in him." Jesus was divine simply and solely because his life was never governed by any other principle. In him humanity was divinity, and divinity, humanity. The world by a right instinct recognizes Jesus as the standard of human excellence. But this is not to say that we shall never reach that standard too; quite the contrary. We must reach it in order to fulfil our destiny and to crown and complete the work of Jesus. "This brings us to the further question of the Deity of Jesus. As a matter of fact, as I have already indicated, this question, too, has long been settled in practice. If by the Deity of Jesus is meant that He possessed the allcontrolling consciousness of the universe, then assuredly He was not the Deity for He did not possess that consciousness. He prayed to His Father, sometimes with agony and dread; He wondered, suffered, wept, and grew weary. He confessed His ignorance of some things and declared Himself to have no concern with others; it is even doubtful how far He was prepared to receive the homage of those about Him. If there be one thing which becomes indisputable from the reading of the gospel narratives it is that Jesus possessed a true human consciousness, limited like our own."

The next question is, to determine the meaning of the title "Christ," applied to Jesus. The author of The New Theology sets about it thus: "The idea of a divine Man, the emanation of the infinite, the soul of the universe, the source and goal of all humanity, is ages older than Christian theology. It can be traced in Babylonian religious literature, for instance, at a period older even than the Old Testament. It played a not unimportant part in Greek thought, and Philo of Alexandria, a contemporary of Jesus, works it out in some detail in his religio-philosophic system, which aimed to combine the wide outlook of Greek culture with the high seriousness of Hebrew religion. It is a true, indeed an inevitable, conception, if we hold anything like a consistent view of the immanence of God in His universe. With what God have we to do except the God who is eternally man? This aspect of the nature of God has been variously described in the course of its history. It has been called the Word (Logos), the Son, and, as we have seen, the second person of the Trinity. For various reasons I prefer to call it-or rather Himthe eternal Christ. According to the New Testament writers, Jesus was and is the Christ, but in His earthly life His consciousness of the fact was limited. But, as we have come forth from this fontal

manhood, we too must be to some extent expressions of this eternal Christ; and it is in virtue of that fact that we stand related to Jesus, and that the personality of Jesus has anything to do with us. Here is where the value of our belief in the interaction of the higher and the lower self comes in. Fundamentally our being is already one with that of the eternal Christ."

Very interesting are the chapters on the Atonement, which make up about one-third of the entire book. They form an invaluable bridge from the old orthodoxy to the newer vistas of to-day. We must, however, pass on to the closing section of the book, and touch on the views put forward concerning Salvation and Resurrection. Our author holds the doctrine that sin and selfishness are two expressions for the same thing. "If sin is selfishness," he says, "salvation must consist in ceasing to be selfish, that is, it represents the victory of love in the human heart. This may be represented as the uprising of the deeper self, the true man, the Christ man in the experience of the penitent. Wherever you see a man trying to do something for the common good, you see the uprising of the spirit of Christ; what he is doing is a part of the Atonement. In church or out of church, with or without a formal creed, this is the true way in which the redemption of the world is proceeding. Every man who is trying to live so as to make his life a blessing to the world is being saved himself in the process, saved by becoming a saviour. Ordinary observation ought to tell us that untold thousands of our fellow-beings, even among those who never dream of going to church, are being saved in this way. This is the true way to look at the matter. The Christ, the true Christ who was and is Jesus, but who is also the deeper self of every human being, is saving individuals by filling them with the unselfish desire to save the race. It is this unselfish desire to minister to the common good which is the true salvation.”

"And who, pray, is the judge? Who but yourself? The deeper self is the judge, the self who is eternally one with God. The pain caused by sin arises from the soul, which is potentially infinite and cannot have its true nature denied. If you go and live over a sewer, you will be ill. Why? Because you were never meant to live over a sewer. The evil therein attacks you, and the life within you fights to overcome it, and in the process you have to suffer. It is just the same with your spiritual nature. You cannot continue to live apart from the whole, for the real you is the whole, and, do what you will, it will overcome everything within you that makes for separateness, and in the process you will have to suffer. This is what the punishment of sin means. It is life battling with death, love striving against selfishness, the deeper soul with the surface soul. It is our own spiritual nature that compels

us to suffer when we sin, and there is no escaping the sentence; if we sin we must suffer, for we are so constituted that what sin does, love with toil and pain must undo. No eleventh hour repentence can evade this issue; in fact, it may be the beginning of it. If we have been treading a wrong road, repentance is turning round and taking the way back. If we have been living a false life, repentance is the beginning of the true, and just in proportion as the false has been accepted, so will the true find it difficult to destroy the lie. You are the judge; you in God."

Lastly, we come to the resurrection of Jesus, and this is likely to be for many people the most startling part of the book. To begin with, our author accepts the resurrection and the subsequent recognition of Jesus by the disciples, as facts: "It is almost indisputable that in some way or other the disciples must have become convinced that they had seen Jesus face to face after the world believed Him to be dead and buried. It is clear that the earliest Christians were absolutely certain that the body of Jesus after the resurrection was the body of Jesus as they had known it before, although apparently it possessed some new and mysterious attributes. In my judgment, also, insistence upon the impossibility of a physical resurrection presumes an essential distinction between matter and spirit which I cannot admit. The philosophy underlying the New Theology as I understand it is monistic idealism, and monistic idealism recognizes no fundamental distinction between matter and spirit. The fundamental reality is consciousness. The socalled material world is the product of consciousness exercising itself along a certain limited plane; the next stage of consciousness above this is not an absolute break with it, although it is an expansion of experience or readjustment of focus. Admitting that individual self-consciousness persists beyond the change called death, it only means that such consciousness is being exercised along another plane; from a three-dimensional it has entered a four-dimensional world. This new world is no less and no more material than the present; it is all a question of the range of consciousness. It is this view, the view that matter exists only in and for mind, that leads me to believe that less than justice has been done by liberal thinkers to the theory of the physical resurrection of Jesus."

It is doubtful if such a startling proposition has ever before been put forward in such a simple and matter-of-fact way. The change called death, it is suggested, is the passage from three-dimensional to four-dimensional being; neither less nor more than that. But our author goes on the make the direct application to Jesus: "Imagine a being free of a three-dimensional world trying to converse with a being still limited to a two-dimensional world, and we have a clew to what I think