product-a human life brooded over by the Spirit of God and transformed by the power of God. "Work out your own salvation, for it is God who worketh in you to will and to do of his good pleasure." But while the two elements are so interwoven that it is difficult to tell where the human ends and the divine begins, Christianity is not a purely subjective experience. It has objective reality and divine validity. Wesley knew that his experience was not a delusion, because it brought him peace such as he had never known before and power to realize his ideals more freely than any other philosophy or method of life ever tried by him. He knew that it came from the Author of his being because it exactly matched the nature which that Author had given him; it found him at greater depths of his being and it lifted him to greater heights of existence than any other experience he had ever known. His neighbors knew that Wesley's experience was of God and not a personal delusion because it transformed a small and somewhat impertinent meddler in morals into a tireless reformer and the most effective Christian worker England has ever known. "By their fruits ye shall know them." You and I may know that Wesley's experience was of God because it is certified by the Bible-a book which has been proved true by millions throughout the ages, a book which may be verified by you and me to-day. "If any man willeth to do his will, he shall know of the teaching."

The value of the Way of Salvation which John Wesley discovered in Luther's Preface to the Romans, as Luther discovered it in Paul, and Paul in Christ, is that it furnishes the divine method of human progress. The difficulties which confront the soul are twofold-self-confidence and despair. The first leaves the soul in its infinite needs with only finite resources. The second doubts God and neglects even the faithfulness upon which his incoming depends. The difference, while appearing in many forms and under various names, is fundamental. Individualism is seen in the tireless self-centered worker in business or science who attempts to set aside or overcome his environment. Individualism in re

ligion is seen in the moralist who seeks perfection in his own strength; in the Buddhist who believes in Karma; in the Confucian who boasts his observance of the fire methods; in the Roman Catholic who aims at sainthood; in the Protestant who regards faith only as fidelity to the laws of the universe and remains self-centered. On the other hand, fate is seen in the laboring man who believes in luck and lazily waits for something to turn up; in the materialistic scientist who denies the existence of human freedom or the value of effort in evolution. In religion this weakness is seen in tens of millions of orientals who confound providence with fate and stolidly await their doom; in the great majority of Roman Catholics who disobey the Church and depend upon extreme unction finally to deliver them from the consequences of their sins, and, in case of any oversight, upon prayers for the dead to deliver them from purgatory; in the multitudes of Protestant Church members who continue in known sin and rely upon the blood of Christ for a magical salvation as the Catholic relies upon the mass. Salvation by faith involves the completest self-surrender and humility on the one side, with such a divinely presented obedience and such victories through an indwelling Christ on the other side, as are clearly miraculous and incredible to the unregenerate.

Wesley in his doctrine of salvation by grace taught the finite to rest upon the Infinite, the Church to enter upon the dispensation of the Spirit, and each Christian to say with Paul, "I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me." Salvation either by morality outside the Church or by sainthood inside the Church is simply impossible of achievement; and, if it could be achieved, it would leave the soul still self-centered and selfish and lost. In his doctrine of Christian perfection, which Mr. Wesley regarded as his peculiar contribution to Christendom, he combated the opposite vice of spiritual laziness and permitted no Christian to attempt to cover his sin with the robe of Christ's righteousness. He demanded rather as the first condition of salvation at all faith in the sense of fidelity, a faith which enables each follower of Christ to say,

"I was not disobedient to the heavenly vision;" such an obedience as leads the Christian to say, "Yes, Lord," to every command of Christ; such an obedience as leads the Christian to close the chasm between the ideal and the real just as rapidly and as far as the steps in daily duty are revealed to him. Wesley summoned the believer in Christian perfection to such a surrender as enables the Holy Spirit to take full possession of the soul, casting down imaginations and bringing every thought in subjection to the obedience of Christ. Such an achievement is impossible with man but entirely possible with God; and the soul in which this moral miracle is achieved is so fully persuaded that the work is beyond its power, so conscious of the Spirit's presence, that it remains human and God-centered to the last. Human greatness is measured by humanity's capacity for God. Such a redemption is possible for each one of us. Try it and you will see how the finite may be reinforced by the Infinite, how "you may be filled with all the fullness of God." You will then recognize how Wesley in his doctrine of Christian perfection. has blazed the path for the Forward Movement of the twentieth century.

J. W. Bashfor

EDITORIAL DEPARTMENTS.

NOTES AND DISCUSSIONS.

DREAMS THAT COME TRUE.

IN a bitter January a schooner bound from Fernandina for Demerara sprung aleak in heavy weather and settled in the sea till her decks were all awash. The captain's wife, lashed to the top of the deck house, kept watch for a sail. On the third night, falling asleep from exhaustion, she saw in a dream a great ship coming to their rescue. Awaking at daylight, she opened her eyes on the fulfillment of the vision. A towering mass of canvas stood up against the southern sky; a big ship sailing northward from far Cape Horn was bearing straight down upon the water-logged lumber schooner. Approaching deliverance cast its shadow before; the shadow fell upon the sleeping woman; she came through her dream to the salvation it foretold. So runs the story. Whether true or not, it may introduce pictorially to the mind the moral certainty that humanity is to be saved by the coming true of its happiest dreams.

That man has had certain noble persuasions of things unseen and presentiments of things to come is matter of fact; whether these were perceptions of reality and revelations of truth vouchsafed from a benign, superhuman source, or were hallucinations self-generated from within, is, it seems, matter of dispute. According to the views of some investigators religion, in its genesis and its nature, belongs in the category of dreams. Huxley thinks that primitive man obtained his first conception of a spirit world from his experience in dreams; and it is asserted that man has no valid evidence of any objective reality corresponding to this dream-born conception. Tylor, the anthropologist, Herbert Spencer, and others also inform us that the origin of religion was in the dreams of primitive man, of whom, it is assumed, the savage of to-day is so certainly the mental type that by studying the latter we may know the former. It is explained that to the savage "all dreams are realities, and dreamland is to him an actual spirit land. The memories of dreams

are accepted by the savage as veritable experiences of the spirit world, are narrated as such in perfect good faith, and thus that shadowy realm becomes an object of unquestioning belief." According to Leslie Stephen, according to the unknown author of the book entitled Supernatural Religion, and according to agnostics of all schools, our beliefs are only "our dreams," to which no one knows that there are any corresponding facts. These so-called dreams, they say, are the effects and not the cause of our qualities; that is to say, we hold certain beliefs because we are what we are, and it is in no degree true that we are what we are because we cherish certain beliefs. Our Christian creeds, they think, are but the formulation, in terms of dreamland, of imaginings spontaneously produced and projected by our own minds; they do not contain any truth revealed to us, but are a revelation only of the contents of human nature; and they are less substantial than the spider's web in the morning grass which the insect spins out of his own bowels in the darkness of the night as we spin creeds in the darkness of our ignorance and superstition.

All these theorists exert themselves, with zeal worthy of a better cause, to bring quickly in the time apprehended in the lament of Hermes Trismegistus, when "the religious man shall be held insane the victim of delusions, taking daydreams for realities, the devotee of enchanted nothings and illusory phantasms, like the dream of the oriental Maya." To these dismal gentlemen, naturally enough, Zola adds himself, a champion "realist" who knows real things when he sees them, and paints them to the life, so that if one wants to commune with reality he should go to Zola's books and not to the New Testament. Zola writes that the Christian religion, like all others, grew up because "Humanity thirsts after illusions. It was born of that need of the Lie" (and he writes "lie" with a capital as we do the name of God)-"born of that necessity for credulity which is a characteristic of human nature. foundation of all religions." from such a source it seems not man, to whom the world is a sty where he goes about on all fours in the mire, interrupts his nosing of nastiness and gives himself a crick in the neck by lifting his head a moment toward the high theme of religion for the purpose of expressing his swinish

This is in fact the story of the Concerning such an utterance improper to remark that when a