necessarily reveals himself as a Trinity of persons, and that to deny this is to represent men as "the heathen who know not God," he feels as if he had taken sand into his mouth. He is inclined to ask what these Neo-Platonic or mediæval doctrines are doing in the nineteenth century, and why we should resuscitate dead logomachies that can have no possible value for life or conduct. Now, I must not attempt here to discuss the difficult question of Hegel's ultimate conception of the being of God, and I am bound to warn any one who may read these pages that I only profess to reproduce one—though by far the most prominent—side of that conception. But, subject to this reservation, I have no hesitation in saying, that our own prejudices form the only hindrance to our seeing that Hegel's subject-matter is here, as elsewhere, human life. He gives us what he takes to be the literal truth, and we will have it to be metaphor. Verbally contradicting Kant, he accepts, completes, and enforces Kant's thought. "Revelation can never be the true ground of religion," said Kant; "for revelation is an historical accident, and religion is a rational necessity of man's intelligent nature." "Revelation is the only true knowledge of God and ground of religion," says Hegel, "because revelation consists in the realization of God in man's intelligent nature." We are, however, not unaccustomed to such phrases, and our imagination is equal to its habitual task of evading their meaning. We take them to be a strong metaphor, meaning that God, who is a sort of ghostly being a long way off, is, notwithstanding, more or less within the knowledge of our minds, and so is "in" them, as a book which is actually in London may be in my memory when I am in Scotland. Now, right or wrong, this is not what Hegel means. He means what he says; that God is spirit or mind,[10] and exists in the medium of mind, which is actual as intelligence, for us at any rate, only in the human self-consciousness. The thought is hard from its very simplicity, and we struggle, as always, to avoid grasping it. We imagine spirits as made of a sort of thin matter, and so as existing just like bodies, although we call them disembodied. And then we think of this disembodied form as an alternative to human form, and suppose spirit to have somehow a purer existence apart from human body. This error really springs from imagining the two as existences of the same kind, and so conflicting, and from not realizing the notion of spirit as mind or self-consciousness, which is the only way of conceiving its actual presence in our world.

Mind uses sensuous existence as its symbol; perhaps even needs it. The poet who has hit Hegel's thought so nearly,[11] fails here:—