thus put in the forefront.  The vast masses of material of this sort which the religious world, both past and present, possesses, have been either actually unexplored, or else set forth in ways which distorted and obscured the facts.  The experience is the fact.  The best science the world knows is now to deal with it as it would deal with any other fact.  This is the epoch-making thing, the contribution to method in James’s book.  James was born in New York in 1842, the son of a Swedenborgian theologian.  He took his medical degree at Harvard in 1870.  He began to lecture there in anatomy in 1872 and became Professor of Philosophy in 1885.  He was a Gifford and a Hibbert Lecturer.  He died in 1910.

When James’s thesis shall have been fully worked out, much supposed investigation of primitive religions, which is really nothing but imagination concerning primitive religions, will be shown in its true worthlessness.  We know very little about primitive man.  What we learn as to primitive man, on the side of his religion, we must learn in part from the psychology of the matured and civilised, the present living, thinking, feeling man in contact with his religion.  Matured religion is not to be judged by the primitive, but the reverse.  The real study of the history of religions, the study of the objective phenomena, from earliest to latest times, has its place.  But the history of religions is perverted when it takes for fact in the life of primitive man that which never existed save in the imagination of twentieth century students.  Early Christianity, on its inner and spiritual side, is to be judged by later Christianity, by present Christianity, by the Christian experience which we see and know to-day, and not conversely, as men have always claimed.  The modern man is not to be converted after the pattern which it is alleged that his grandfather followed.  For, first, there is the question as to whether his grandfather did conform to this pattern.  And beyond that, it is safer to try to understand the experience of the grandfather, whom we do not know, by the psychology and experience of the grandson, whom we do know, with, of course, a judicious admixture of knowledge of the history of the nineteenth century, which would occasion characteristic differences.  The modern saint is not asked to be a saint like Francis.  In the first place, how do we know what Francis was like?  In the second place, the experience of Francis may be most easily understood by the aid of modern experience of true revolt from worldliness and of consecration to self-sacrifice, as these exist among us, with, of course, the proper background furnished by the history of the thirteenth century.  Souls are one.  Our souls may be, at least in some measure, known to ourselves.  Even the souls of some of our fellows may be measurably known to us.  What are the facts of the religious experience?  How do souls react in face of the eternal?  The experience of religion, the experience of the fatherhood of God, of the sonship