the end will be success. We rely confidently
on God. If it is asked, Why is it a part of faith to have a childlike
confidence in an unseen God?--we reply, that the main origin of such
confidence is to be found in the wonderful condescension of God
exhibited in the Incarnation, the Cross, and the Resurrection.

This is not the place to enter on a detailed examination of the
essential importance of these great central facts of Christian belief in
establishing faith in the unseen, and distinguishing its grasp from the
blind clutches of credulity; but a single consideration will suffice at
least to awaken a feeling of a wide _vista_ of possibility when we put
it thus: Do we wonder at the spectacle of a righteous man, passing his
life in suffering and poverty, seemingly stricken by the Divine
hand?--But is not the case altered when we reflect _that the Hand that
thus smites is a hand itself pierced_ with the Cross-nails of a terrible
human suffering, undergone solely on man's account?

It can be proved easily, by exhaustive examples, to be the case, that
wherever the finite is brought into contact with the Infinite, that
there must be a dead-lock, a leading up successively to two conclusions,
one of which is almost, if not quite, contrary to the other. A very
striking instance of this is the question of Predestination and
Free-will. From the finite side, I am conscious that I am a free agent:
I can will to rise up and to lie down. It is true that my will may be
influenced, strongly or feebly, by various means--by the effect of
habit, by the inherited tendency of my constitution, by some present
motive of temptation, and so forth: but the _will_ is there--the
motive-influence or inclining-power is not the will, but that which
affects or works on will. A _motive_ pulls me this way, another pulls me
that; but in the end, my _will_ follows one or the other. I can, then,
do as I please. On the other hand, Infinite Knowledge must know, and
have known from all eternity, what I shall do now, and at every moment
of my future being: and for Omnipotence to know from all eternity what
will be, is, in our human sense, practically undistinguishable from the
thought that the Power has predestined the same; and man cannot of
course alter that. Here, then, by separate lines of thought, we are
brought to two opposite and irreconcilable conclusions. It is so always.
We cannot ourselves imagine how a fixed set of laws and rules can be
followed