every intellectual man quickly learns, that beyond the energy of his personal conscious intellect he is capable of a new energy (as of an intellect doubled on itself) by abandonment to the nature of things; that besides his power as an individual man, there is a great public power, upon which he can draw, by unlocking at all risks his human doors, and suffering the etherial tides to roll and circulate through him." If the beauty of the starry heavens above us, the sense of moral responsibility within us, the aspirations of our better natures towards ideals of perfection, the fulness and tone which come when the pause of reflection has set in, give us no true insight into the nature of that Power which sustains man and the universe, then what do they give us?

But religious faith sweeps farther and higher than such experiences as I have quoted. It postulates a divine benignity which cares for the individual, and works with boundless grace even through the wrath and terror of the world. Men in

1

vast numbers have actually ventured everything on the hypothesis that in living a life of love they were reproducing in a measure the divine nature, and they have not been put to confusion. If their faith were vain, then when they took the leap they would have fallen into vacuity, but their concurrent testimony has been that they found a Rock beneath their feet. If this faith in a divine Providence were a delusion, then the men who came under its baleful influence would have deformed and brittle characters. On the contrary theirs are the most firm-fibred and lustrous characters the world has produced. Those who have sent the roots of their being down most deeply into the faith of a divine Love have been the most revered men in history. The men who brought back the grapes of Escol may have known little about Canaan and the processes of grape culture, but they knew that there was soil in Palestine and that it was good, the lusciousness of the grapes was sufficient evidence.

Religious faith would have vanished from the world long ago, if it had put one out of joint with the Nature of Things. If no help had ever come from the Unseen, the impulse to pray would long ago have died out. The saints may be confused and confusing in their speech about religion, but with unanimity they report the same experience. Christians sing in twentieth century America psalms which were written in Asia three thousand years ago. Catholics and Protestant use the same prayers and the same hymns. Their creeds differ, but they touch the same Reality, and experience the same peace and spiritual liberty.

Reason, acting valorously on the assumption that the Soul of the Universe abundantly meets every need of the soul of man, is not duped, it obtains through experience a strong inner certainty, and this inner certainty the saint finds is not a private possession, but is shared by a great host whom no man can number. He accepts multiplied experience as proper

evidence that the inner certitude reflects a Reality and is genuine knowledge. He may not have fixity of conception, but he knows God.

I listened the other day to a cultivated man who is actually living a life of love. He is practising the incarnation. Going down into the slums, he is living among a vicious and ignorant people for the sole purpose of conforming them to Jesus Christ. By an act of faith he has committed everything he has and is to the redemptive power of love. Here is faith in a good God put to the severest test. What is the result? He has found there in the mud and scum of things spiritual strength, liberty, peace, and a strong, calm character. He has also learned in that school of tough experience that there is something divine in the most degraded men that, touched by the energies of love, will make them new creatures. After fifteen years of such work could that man be persuaded to say: "I know the dirt of these streets, but I can only affirm a faith that

love is of God." On the contrary he is more sure that through the passion of love he has found the Everlasting Strength and Mercy than he is sure of the filth of the street. The only word strong enough to express his experience is the word. "know," and one looking at the granite strength and gentle sweetness of a character refined in such conditions is convinced that this manhood is not nurtured on illusions. His intellectual conceptions may be very limited, but he has drawn his nutriment from Reality.

What I wish to claim is this: Science does not have knowledge and religion simply faith. The lover, the artist, the musician know, so does the saint. Religion has always used the word "knowledge" freely and always will, because no lesser term expresses her experiences. Both science and religion begin with an act of faith. Both reach results. Those of science are sufficiently verified for a man to base his actions and his civilization upon them. Those of religion are so