that is its Divine glory.' The moral theory of the contemporary rationalists was correlative to their religious theory. To be religious was to believe that certain facts had once happened; to be moral was to believe that under certain circumstances you would at some future time go to hell. Virtue of that kind was not to Edwards' taste, though few men have been less sparing in using the appeal to damnation. But threats of hell-fire were only meant to startle the sinner from his repose. His morality could be framed from no baser material than love to the Divine perfections. 'What thanks are due to you for not loving your own misery, and for being willing to take some pains to escape burning in hell to all eternity? There is ne'er a devil in hell but would gladly do the same' (viii. 145). The strength, however, and the weakness of Edwards as a moralist are best illustrated from the two treatises on the Religious Affections and on Original Sin. The first, which was the fruit of his experiences at Northampton, may be described as a system of religious diagnostics. By what symptoms are you to distinguish--that was the problem which forced itself upon him--the spiritual state produced by the Divine action from that which is but a hollow mockery? After his mode of judging in concrete cases, as already indicated, we are rather surprised by the calm and sensible tone of his argument. The deep sense of the vast importance of the events to which he was a witness makes him the more scrupulous in testing their real character. He resists the temptation to dwell upon those noisy and questionable manifestations in which the vulgar thirst for the wonderful found the most appropriate testimony to the work. Roman Catholic archbishops at the present day can exhort their hearers to put their faith in a silly story of a vision, on the express ground that the popularity of the belief amongst Catholics proves its Divine origin. That is wonderfully like saying that a successful lie should be patronised so long as it is on the side of the Church. Edwards, brought up in a manlier school, deals with such phenomena in a different spirit. Suppose, he says, that a person terrified by threats of hell-fire has a vision 'of a person with a beautiful countenance, smiling on him with arms open and with blood dropping down,' whom he supposes to be Christ come to promise him eternal life, are we to assume that this vision and the consequent transports infallibly indicate supernatural agency? No, he replies, with equal sense and honesty; 'he must have but slightly considered human nature who thinks such things cannot arise in this manner without any supernatural excitement of Divine power' (iv. 72). Many mischievous delusions have their origin in this error. 'It is a low, miserable notion of spiritual sense' to suppose that these 'external ideas' (ideas, that is, such as enter by the senses) are proofs of Divine interference. Ample experience has