shown that they are proofs not of the spiritual health which comes from communion with God, but of 'weakness of body and mind and distempers of body' (iv. 143). Experience has supplied exemplary confirmations of Edwards' wisdom. Neither bodily convulsions, nor vehement excitement of mind, nor even revelations of things to come (iv. 158), are sufficient proofs of that mysterious change of soul which is called conversion. No external test, in fact, can be given. Man cannot judge decisively, but the best symptoms are such proofs as increased humility, a love of Christ for His own sake, without reference to heaven or hell, a sense of the infinite beauty of Divine things, a certain 'symmetry and proportion' between the affections themselves (iv. 314), a desire for higher perfection, and a rich harvest of the fruit of Christian practice. So far, Edwards is unassailable from his own point of view. Our theory of religion may differ from his; but at least he fully realises how profound is the meaning of the word, and aims at conquering all human faculties, not at controlling a few external manifestations. But his further applications of the theory lead him into more doubtful speculations. That Being, a union with whom constitutes true holiness, is not only to be the ideal of perfect goodness, but He must be the God of the Calvinists, who fulfils the stipulations of a strange legal bargain, and the God of the Jews, who sentences whole nations to massacre for the crimes of their ancestors. Edwards has hitherto been really protesting against that lower conception of God which is latent in at least the popular versions of Catholic or Arminian theology, and to which Calvinism opposes a loftier view. God, on this theory, is not really almighty, for the doctrine of free-will places human actions and their results beyond His control. He is scarcely omniscient, for, like human rulers, He judges by actions, not by the intrinsic nature of the soul, and therefore distributes His rewards and punishments on a system comparable to that of mere earthly jurisprudence. He is at most the infallible judge of actions, not the universal ordainer of events and distributor of life and happiness. Edwards' profound conviction of the absolute sovereignty of God leads him to reject all such feeble conceptions. But he has now to tell us where the Divine influence has actually displayed itself; and his view becomes strangely narrowed. Instead of confessing that all good gifts come from God, he infers that those which do not come from his own God must be radically vicious. Already, as we have seen, in virtue of his leading principle, he has denied to all natural affections the right to be truly virtuous. Unless they involve a conscious reference to God, they are but delusive resemblances of the reality. He admits that the natural man can in various ways produce very fair imitations of true virtue. By help of association of ideas, for example, or by the force of sympathy, it is