The religious consciousness is itself abstract; and as an abstraction, _i.e._ if taken to be the whole of what we know and feel and do, is capable of leading to false conclusions: no religious belief can stand permanently which runs counter to the facts of science or the moral faith of mankind. No amount of spiritual experience will add to our knowledge of chemistry or physics, or be valid evidence against any truth of science. It may serve to prevent the premature acceptance of something too hastily put forward as a scientific fact, in the same way that science may overthrow a belief erroneously supposed to be religious. But though the religious consciousness is an abstraction, in the same sense that the scientific and moral consciousness are abstractions, each is valid in its own sphere; and the whole evidence of consciousness in all its three phases must be taken together, if we are to elicit any universal principles of thought and action, any unity in our experience, any purpose in evolution. From this point of view we shall expect to find a unity of experience corresponding to the unity of consciousness, and to discover that there is a fundamental identity underlying the apparent diversity in that reality of which in consciousness we are aware. What gives this unity to experience is the permanence which we attribute to the real, in whatever way the real is apprehended: the real, whether apprehended in sense-experience or in moral conviction or in spiritual experience, is characterised by permanence, as distinguished from the passing feelings with which we view it and from the transient experience we have of it. The reality of the things of which we are aware through our senses is conceived as something permanent, and is implied to be so conceived by all theories of evolution which wish to be taken seriously. The permanence of moral obligation is not conceived by those who are genuinely convinced of its reality to vary or to come and go with the flickering gleams of our moral resolutions. Nor when spiritual light is withdrawn from our hearts is it supposed, by those who believe it to be the light of God's countenance, to be quenched for the time. The fundamental identity of the real throughout its diversity is what is postulated by science when it explains the process of evolution by means of the law of continuity. It is equally postulated by the moral philosopher who claims objective validity for the moral law on the ground that it is the same for all rational minds. It is the faith of the religious mind which not only feels the Divine love in its own heart, and finds it every time it obeys the conscience, but also divines it in the uniformity of Nature and throughout the process of evolution.