'moral' gifts among these charismata, and point out that the former degenerated whereas the latter have remained of abiding value. This is surely rather unscientific: none of the gifts are miraculous, though some are psychic, and some of these rarer than others; while all the nine are moral in so far as they are well used. Is not the suggestion also rather complacent? We seem to congratulate ourselves that, because we leave almost dormant the great boon of mental healing, and because our tame lives show hardly any signs of psychic power; and because our plethora of Sunday sermons is fatal to the very spirit of prophecy, therefore we have made some indefinable growth in moral excellence since the time of S. Paul. He shared these gifts and believed in them, and found value even in the last three, supernormal though they were; and those primitive disciples of his, whom we contemplate from the altitude of our libraries, proved their mettle when the time came. May it not be that God intends specially religious people to have more than normal capacities, that the law of spiritual increment naturally produces psychic results; and that it is no virtue of ours to have sacrificed these capacities to a rather dusty intellectualism which is already sinking into obsolescence? Perhaps S. Paul was right after all. He had excellent opportunities for knowing, and he seems to have had no doubt of the permanent value of any of the charismata
