housands, out of every kindred and tongue and nation,
throughout the world, testify what the God and Father of Jesus Christ
means to them. Are we all self-deceived?

Nor are we limited to the experiences of those who at best impress us as
partially religious. For the final confirmation of our faith we look to
the ideal Believer, who not only has an ampler religious experience than
any other, but also possesses more power to create faith, and to take us
farther into the Unseen; we look unto Jesus, the Author and Perfecter of
faith. His life and death, His character and influence, remain the
world's most priceless possession. Was the faith which produced them,
the faith which inspired Him, an hallucination? There is contained in
that life more proof that God is, than in all other approach of God to
man, or of man to God.

The other test of the correctness of our inference drawn from our
religious experience is its practical value, the way in which it works
in life. "He that willeth to do His will shall know." Coleridge bursts
out indignantly: "'Evidences of Christianity'! I am weary of the word.
Make a man feel the want of it; rouse him, if you can, to the
self-knowledge of the need of it; and you may safely trust it to its own
evidence." Religion approaches men saying, "O taste and see that the
Lord is good." He cannot be good unless He _is_. A fancied Deity, an
invention however beautiful of men's brain, supposed to be a living
Being, cannot be a blessing, but, like every other falsehood, a curse.
If our religion is a stained glass window we color to hide the void
beyond, then in the name of things as they are, whether they have a God
or not, let us smash the deceiving glass, and face the darkness or the
daylight outside. "Religion is nothing unless it is true," and its
workableness is the test of its truth. Behind the accepted hypotheses of
science lie countless experiments; and anyone who questions an
hypothesis is simply bidden repeat the experiment and convince himself.
Behind the fundamental conviction of Christians are generations of
believers who have tried it and proved it. The God and Father of Jesus
is a tested hypothesis; and he who questions must experiment, and let
God convince him. To commit one's self to God in Christ and be redeemed
from most real sins--turned from selfishness to love, from slavery to
freedom; to trust Him in most real difficulties and perplexities, and
find one's self empowered and enl