long as one clearly understands that of course it is not true. “Nature” is the only indubitable reality, and mind is but a kind of _lusus_ or _luxus naturæ_, which accompanies it at some few places, like a peculiarly coloured aura or shadow, but which must, as far as reality is concerned, yield pre-eminence to “Nature” in every respect. The religious conception is deeply and essentially antagonistic to all such attempts to range spirit, spiritual being, and the subjective world under “nature,” “matter,” “energy,” or whatever we may call what is opposed to mind and ranked above it in reality and value. The religious conception is made up essentially of a belief in spirit, its worth and pre-eminence. It does not even seek to compare the reality and origin of spirit with anything else whatever. For all its beliefs, the most sublime and the crudest alike, conceal within them the conviction that fundamentally spirit alone has truth and reality, and that everything else is derived from it. It is a somewhat pitiful mode of procedure to direct all apologetic endeavours towards the one relatively small question of “immortality,” thus following exactly the lines usually adopted by the aggressive exponents of naturalism, and thus allowing opponents to dictate the form of the questions and answers. It is quite certain that all religion which is in any way complete, includes within itself a belief in the everlastingness of our spiritual, personal nature, and its independence of the becoming or passing away of external things. But, on the one hand, this particular question can only be settled in connection with the whole problem, and, on the other hand, it is only a fraction of the much farther-reaching belief in the reality of spirit and its superiority to nature. The very being of religion depends upon this. That it may be able to take itself seriously and regard itself as true; that all deep and pious feelings, of humility and devotion, may be cherished as genuine and as founded in truth; that it behoves it to find and experience the noble and divine in the world’s course, in history and in individual life; that the whole world of feeling with all its deep stirrings and mysteries is of all things the most real and true, and the most significant fact of existence—all these are features apart from which it is impossible to think of religion at all. But they all depend upon the reality, independence and absolute pre-eminence of spirit. Freedom and responsibility, duty, moral control and self-development, the valuation of life and our life-work according to our life’s mission and ideal aims, even according to everlasting aims, and “sub specie æterni,” the idea of the good, the true and the beautiful—all things apart from which religion cannot be thought of—all these depend upon spirit and its truth. And finally “God is Spirit”: religion cannot represent, or conceive, or possess its own highest good and supreme idea, except by thinking in terms