The whole of this theory rested, it will be observed, on a sensuous system of mental philosophy. "All knowledge comes through the senses," was its foundation. Revelation, like every other form of knowledge, must come through the senses. A miracle, which appeals to the sight, touch, hearing, is the only possible proof of a divine act. For, in the last analysis, all our theology rests on our philosophy. Theology, being belief, must proceed according to those laws of belief, whatever they are, which we accept and hold. The man who thinks that all knowledge comes through the senses must receive his theological knowledge also that way, and no other. This was the general opinion thirty or forty years ago; hence this theory of Christianity, which supposes that God is obliged to break his own laws in order to communicate it. But the result of this belief was harmful. It tended to make our religion formal, our worship a mere ceremony; it made real communication with God impossible; it turned prayer into a self-magnetizing operation; it left us virtually "without God and hope in the world." Thanks to Him who never leaves himself without a witness in the human heart, this theory was often nullified in practice by the irrepressible instincts which it denied, by the spiritual intuitions which it ridiculed. Even Professor Norton, its chief champion, had a heart steeped in the sweetest piety. Denying, intellectually, all intuitions of God, Duty, and Immortality, his beautiful and tender hymns show the highest spiritual insight. Still it cannot be denied that this theory tended to dry up the fountains of religious faith in the human heart, and to leave us in a merely mechanical and unspiritualized world. Now the first voice which came to break this enchantment was, to many, the voice of Thomas Carlyle. It needed for this end, it always needs, a man who could come face to face with Truth. Every great idol-breaker, every man who has delivered the world from the yoke of Forms, has been one who was able to see the substance of things, who was gifted with the insight of realities. Forms of worship, forms of belief, at first the channels of life, through which the Living Spirit flowed into human hearts, at last became petrified, incrusted, choked. A few drops of the vital current still ooze slowly through them, and our parched lips, sucking these few drops, cling all the more closely to the form as it becomes less and less a vehicle of life. The poorest word, old and trite, is precious when there is no open vision. We do well continually to resort to the half-dead form, "till the day dawn, and the day-star arise in our hearts."