Note 10 — Chapter III · WORSHIP.

It is, I think, in this connection important to distinguish between the question, How do you in practice distinguish between a true and a false message? and the quite separate inquiry, How do you in theory distinguish between the human faculty of imagination and the Divine action signified by the word “inspiration”? It is with the first question only that I have been concerned in the text, as it is, I believe, the only question with which honesty requires us to grapple. Any attempt to give a full answer to the second question would require a degree of psychological skill to which I have no claim; and I doubt whether the very terms of the question do not lead us beyond the province even of psychology. But, speaking in a popular and trustful way, I should reply that we are not concerned to discern the precise limits of the Divine and the human; only to throw open the deepest human powers to the purest Divine influences; that the result we look for is the fruit of a devout intelligence, first purified, and then swayed, by the immediate action of Divine power. It surely involves something like a contradiction in terms to inquire at what precise line a distinction is obliterated?