A few days ago, meeting one of my scientific friends, I happened to mention the fact that I was going to Harvard to deliver the Dudleian Lecture, and that I had chosen as my subject “The Permanent Significance of Miracle for Religion.” “It is a good subject,” he said, “but you have left out the most important word. It ought to read ‘The Lack of Permanent Significance of Miracle for Religion.’”

In one sense of the word there is of course no place in the ministry for the uneducated man. The preacher who is so ignorant as to be illiterate—illiterate in that he does not read and study and observe—is not to be thought of as a candidate for the ministry. If, on the other hand, we think of the educated minister as the student who has been graduated from college and from theological seminary, we rather narrowly limit our definition of education. Many men of unusual success in the ministry have preferred to take graduate work along certain specific lines rather than to pursue the course in the seminary. In this they may have been mistaken, but of course they belong by pre-eminent right in the ranks of the educated. Moreover, the fact of actually receiving a degree is not the chief essential. Perhaps for our purpose we may define the educated minister as one who has in a reputable college, university, or seminary mastered the point of view of the scholar, attained some success in the use of scholarly methods, and acquired scholarly habits. For our purpose the uneducated minister is one who has not received his training at such an institution. We assume, however, in our use of the word “uneducated” that the minister has studious habits, and that he does the best he can to make good by incessant effort the lack of early institutional training; otherwise we can hardly see what place he has in the ministry. We may be permitted further to drop from our consideration both the occasional pulpit “genius,” who comes to popular power without formal mental training, and also that bearer of scholastic degrees who is remarkable chiefly for his dulness.

What special students of so-called psychic phenomena will think of Mr. Henry Holt's two generous volumes I do not know, but to me, and no doubt to many like me, they are quite the most important and significant, as they are the most entertaining, exposition of the subject. This is indeed something more than a dead book; it is a life—as it were the voice of a friend confiding to us through the hours of a long winter night the lessons, still mingled with hesitations and questions, of his ripe experience. The publicity of high spirits may abound; but there are pages also which will reveal their full meaning only to those who know the author as a friend in the literal sense of the word, passages, for those who understand, of almost sacred privacy. So, for instance, the minute account of the spectacle unfolding at sunrise to the eyes of the watcher at the author's summer home has its place and weight for all readers as an argument that, as these lovely things are far beyond “our ancestors' universe of darkness and silence,” so there may be infinite ranges of perception still to be discovered by mankind; but to one who has entered that hospitable “gate, open to all who care to come,” and with the kindly guidance of his host has seen the sunlight falling from mountain top to valley and from valley to lake, the printed words will be something more than the speech of a book to its unseen audience.

I have been a dreamer from my earliest childhood. My dreams have been of all kinds, from the most fantastic and grotesque to those that were orderly and coherent; but I have never had any others like those which I am about to describe. My ordinary dreams often take the form of short stories or adventures of various kinds; among them is one recurrent dream in which I find myself in some house in the Middle West, very hospitably entertained by hosts to whom I am an unwelcome guest. I try to go home, but eastward-bound trains are difficult to reach and the baggage-express is never available. Such experiences seem to have no important meaning. Commonly they fade with the coming of daylight and make no definite or deep impression on the mind.

Set apart from all such commonplace dreams are three visions of the night which came in quick succession, and left me, on awaking in the morning, deeply impressed with a sense of the supernatural. I have no belief that they were revelations having any source outside of my own mind and experience; but they gave me a clue to the understanding of those things that happened of old when in a dream some important revelation was made to a patriarch or prophet; and, whatever their source, they wrought a change in my thought and feeling concerning the reality and nature of the future life that still abides and after five years makes the thought of an incorporeal existence seem perfectly natural and very attractive. They have also made me understand some events in ancient history, and have given a new meaning to the belief that dreams were the favorite channels through which the divine wisdom flowed into human life.

Three recent movements in Canada towards a clearer expression of Christian unity have special significance—the co-operation of the Theological Colleges affiliated to McGill University, the organization of the Church Unity League, and the negotiations for the organic union of the Congregational, Methodist, and Presbyterian Communions.

I remember a certain country church in a Western State as it was about forty years ago. It was a plain, wooden structure with uncushioned seats, uncarpeted floors, and with plain glass windows through which the farmers could keep an eye on their horses, hitched to the racks outside. The men and boys sat on one side of the central aisle, while the women and girls sat on the other, and there were about as many on one side as on the other. The congregation was made up mostly of farmers and their families, who came to church in farm wagons, drawn by work horses. The father and mother in each case usually sat on the spring seat, while the children and the hired men sat on seat-boards, sometimes indulging in the luxury of a cushion made by folding a quilt. Within the church the elderly men sat in the “Amen corner,” and the elderly women sat in the opposite corner. The small boys, for some reason which I did not then understand, sat with their fathers instead of with other boys of their own age.