erned by laws of its own, inset in its essence. Here you might object, and say, that the human soul has been called "naturally Christian"; which seems to be the same as saying, naturally supernatural; for Christianity is, first and last, a supernatural religion. But that is not quite the meaning of the term, "naturally Christian." It is that the soul is naturally open to higher influences, that it is susceptible, capable of being readily caught up into the supernatural, as Habacuc was by the hair of his head.

BENJAMIN. No difficulty there! The hair lent itself very readily to be caught, if there was a hand to seize it. Now there is just the point! There is the divine hand to seize us. There are our possibilities. And yet so little comes of it all! Where is the music, discoursed by all the bass, tenor, treble registers of sentiments, which you seemed to be speaking of?

ST. VICTOR. Well, first, what you say shows one thing, that religion does not consist in those sentiments, which are only domestics in service-and perhaps don't serve, and answer no call. You have come round somewhat from the time when you were making so much of emotional religion.

BENJAMIN. And you too have come round by the gentle law of curvature from tabooing all sentiment to giving it quite a style, title and nobility in the exercise of religion.

ST. VICTOR. I wanted to keep it detached and apart, as a thing capable of most opposite uses, just as melodies are that can serve God or the deviland it has been said that the devil has got all the pretty tunes-just as lyrics may be that sing to profanity or divinity; or the theatre, which began in the Ages of Faith with Christian mysteries, but long ago reached the antipodes in modern theatricals. St.

Francis de Sales tells us of a good Cistercian monk, who inscribed on the walls of his cell two lines of the sensuous Catullus, the holy monk impressing a sentiment of human passion into the highest service of the spirit:

Tu mihi curarum requies, tu nocte vel atra Lumen, et in solis tu mihi turba locis, "Thou my rest in care, thou my light in the darkest night, and, in the loneliest spot, thou the charm of company to me!"

BENJAMIN. So that we can attach our sentiments to anything.

ST. VICTOR. Sentiments are not attached in the sense of being driven. They are drawn out by the object, attracted and elicited. As St. Augustine remarks of the action which grace exercises on us, you don't drive a boy by showing him a nut, you draw him; and, he continues, you don't drive a sheep by holding out a handful of clover, you win it. On the contrary, that Modernistic emotionalism, which I described, makes of some sentiment, called "love tinged with awe," a kind of knight errant that goes about looking for some hero or heroine, and making the thing up, after having already spent on it "love tinged with awe.'

BENJAMIN. Well, we have the object that is drawing us. But again to the question of enlisting lively sentiment!

ST. VICTOR. Here comes the second answer to your difficulty. It lies in the nature and operations of the Imagination. This is a great world open for culture. And here you will find the way of entering into a higher world of thought and contemplation, with all the stimulation you desire of tenderest and liveliest emotions.

CHAPTER XVII

IMAGINATION

BENJAMIN. I should like to know how imagination works on feeling and emotion.

ST. VICTOR. Imagination is the faculty which links the upper and the lower in our composite nature. On the one side, downwards it is the eye of the whole sensitive nature beneath, gathering up the reports of all the outer senses. How you do body forth with that eye all things seen, felt and heard, yea, things no longer present, things distant and past, and you even build up new things out of such sensitive material, with that power of the imagination which is called Fancy! On the other side, upwards it reports such things of sense to the higher intellectual nature, which is ensconced in silence behind a veil, and can touch the outer world only through this avenue of sense. The high intelligence in a spirit like that of man is hidden indeed behind a veil, can see nothing, can hear nothing, except through the medium of imagination which passes on the reports of sense. All the original capital of our mind is circumscribed within the limits of those reports.

On both planes, above and below, in the intellectual world and the sensitive world, there is an appetite for what is good. It is called Will in the upper part. To it belongs Emotion and Passion in the lower part. In neither can this faculty of desire, of fear, of love, move an inch unless knowledge shows the way, the knowledge of imagination in the lower

nature, that of the intellect in the higher. Ignoti nulla cupido; if a thing has never come into view, it has never been an object of desire. If you know nothing of a thing, there is neither desire, nor absence of desire; it does not exist for you.

BENJAMIN. This seems to be very complicated.

ST. VICTOR. We are a very composite nature. The reason is because it is dull clods of matter, called flesh, nerves and sinews, which are elevated by the quickening power of the soul itself to the wonderful functions of representation, emotion, locomotion; all in the service of the impalpable, invisible soul, which is looking out to be fed behind the veil through the intermediary of the palpable sensitive nature and its functions.

The functions of what are called the five outer senses are well known. Every one can count them and their names on his fingers. But what do people know about the internal senses, where the connection is made with the spiritual intelligence, and through that with the will?

These internal ones are not the Five Senses, but they are the Five Wits. Shakespeare refers to them repeatedly, as when he says:

My five wits nor my five senses can

Dissuade one foolish heart from serving thee.

In old English literature, which here is harmonious with scholastic philosophy, these Five Wits were named Common Wit, Imagination, Fantasy, Estimation, Memory. It may be that they are all only five distinct functions of one internal sense, called Sensus communis, or Common Wit.

BENJAMIN. What do you want with five senses inside, or even five functions of one sense?

ST. VICTOR. There is plenty of work for them to do. Common wit is that internal power which brings the scattered reports of the outer five senses together; and therefore it is called "common."

Imagination reconstructs all in the drapery and colours proper to the objects seen and felt.

Fancy adds thereto, or reforms as it chooses, in the way familiar to poets and musicians.

Estimation, or, as scholastic Latin has it, the vis æstimativa, is the knack of sense in imitating intellectual judgments, as when a dog looking out of a window goes down to the garden below, not by tumbling right out and breaking its legs, but by going back to the stairs, and tripping down and round, just as if it had worked out a set of syllogisms with a logical faculty.

Finally, sensitive memory is easily understood. When you have taken an incautious glance at the sun and close your eyes on the spot, you have that sun in your eye for five minutes afterwards, kept there by the organic power which is sensitive memory. You may taste something to-day; and an old association of sense immediately arises which carries you back years, and even to childhood: "I have not tasted that since the long ago, in such and such a country!" Dreams are the magic ground for the rioting of sensitive memory, which comes playing and romping and hauling out things either of fair report, or of another mould, fuming up from the steaming deposits of passion. To the former kind of memory's reports in dreams the commentator A-Lapide applies those words of the pure-minded spouse, thinking of Christ: "I sleep, but my heart watcheth." To the fumes of the latter kind he applies these lines of Claudian on Proserpine:

1 Cant. 5. 2.