in the face of the Angels. We began to realise that
through pain we had become purified; through hardship we had become
kind; through suffering, and in the silence of our own thoughts we had
become wise; through our inner-loneliness--that inner-loneliness which
is part of the "cross" which each man carries with him through Life, we
had found the _blind necessity_ of God.

And in this fashion he returns to us. He is not the same God as of old
(we listen to the pictures of this Old God as He is so often described
from the pulpit, in contemptuous amazement, tinged by disdain), but a
far greater God than He--greater, for the reason that we have become
greater too. We no longer seek to find Him in our hours of
happiness--the only hours when, long ago, we sought to feel His
presence. We _know_ that we shall only find Him in our hours of
loneliness, in our hours of desolation, in our hours of black despair.
Now at last we realise that God is not some Deity apart, but some
spirit within _us_, within every man and woman whose "vision" is turned
towards the stars. He is the "Dream" which is clearer to us than
reality, none the less clear because it is the "Dream" which never in
life comes true. He belongs to us and to the whole world. He is
everywhere, yet nowhere. He is the "soul" in Man, the silent message
in beauty, the miracle in all Nature. He is not a Divinity, living in
some far off bourne we call the sky. He is just that "spirit" in all
men's hearts which is the spirit of their self-sacrifice, of their
charity, of their loving kindness, of their honesty, their uprightness
and their truth. It is the "spirit" which, if men be Immortal, will
surely live on and on for ever. Nothing else is worthy immortality.

_The Will to Faith_

I wish that the great Shakespeare had not written that "immortal" line:

"_The wish is father to the Thought._"

It haunts you throughout your life. Like a flaming sign of
interrogation it burns upon the Altar of Faith Unquestioning, before
which, in your perplexity, Fate forces you--at least once in your
life--to bow the head. It makes us wonder if we should believe all the
evidences of Immortality we do--were Immortality really a state of
Punishment and not of Happiness unspeakable. It is so hard, so very
hard, to disentangle our own desires from our own beliefs; so easy to
confuse what we _ought to believe_ with what, beyond all else, _we want
to believe_. It sometim