I give you here in these pages, or at least proffer you, as I have said, 'something of mine.' That is what it looks like. But, enquiring further, I ask whether as a matter of fact 'I' am separate from 'something of mine,' as, let us say an engine is separate from the power it produces and the work it does. Do I produce thought and knowledge as an engine produces so much horse-power? Is my will or my reason a sort of thing that produces activity as a flower produces its scent? The scent is not the flower; the horse-power is not the engine. There is always a producing _thing_ behind such products. Is there a producing thing behind my knowledge and activity? And the only reasonable answer we can give to this question is that there is not. In my spirit and life there is nothing in the least like a thing or a machine; and when we reason about spirit and life as though there were we plunge into a very sea of confusion. My reason and my will _are_ myself. I am not a thing and I do not produce like a thing. I give and I communicate my very self in giving and communicating my knowledge, my purpose, my will. And in so far as you receive these and take them into yourself you receive me—spirit and life—as person. By harmony between us our wills and reason, our selves, coalesce; they become identical in the concrete, vital identity peculiar to persons, impossible to things, and dependent for its maintenance on the maintenance of harmony by their own free activity. Very partial it is, no doubt, seen by all of us 'as in a mirror darkly'; but it points, with a finger that should draw all eyes, to a great fulfilment. That fulfilment is 'the goal, not the starting-point of human endeavour.' The blank identity of co-existence in a universe is, you may say, a starting-point for reflexion; but real concrete mental coalescence between each and all of us is a real concrete starting-point of life in a personal world. The goal lies far ahead, where that union of persons foreshadowed in our fragmentary intercourse and the low beginnings of our community of life shall be won through that which alone can give it, our union and communion with God. This is more or less a philosopher's way of putting the matter; but it means the same as the Christian's. Now there is a question that forces itself upon us here. Can there be a coalescence of mind and will, an identity, between God and man, of this living, spiritual—that is, real, concrete—kind? Or is God so different from man as to be incommunicable to him? Is he remote from man in his own nature or, indeed, not only remote but alien? The answer to this is that if he is even remote, not to say alien, he is nothing to us and we may ignore him.