y and existence as a whole, and ask--"What means it all?"
Sometimes this question starts out of an individual experience. The
shock of affliction has jarred our hearts; our expectations have come to
naught; bereavement has broken up the routine of our life; or our own
souls have surprised us with sudden revelations. At any rate, we find
our being here involved with mystery. There is something that our
understanding cannot entirely grasp; something that our unassisted eyes
cannot see. And the only help for us in such a case is the Help of
Religion, presenting us, through faith, with an _interpretation_ of
human life--an interpretation which tells us that what we now experience
and behold is only transitional, preliminary, and that we see through a
glass darkly, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be.

And is it necessary for me to dwell upon the strength which has thus
been imparted to sad and wounded spirits, when with perfect trust in
Infinite Goodness they have thus realized that they stand only on one
round of an upward course--only in a little segment of the immense plan?
I will merely say now, that if, through faith, religion is a help to
these by interpreting life in harmony with individual experience, so
through this faith does it help the meditative man troubled by the
general problem of existence and humanity. The meaning of these various
conditions in the city--the meaning of these sins, and sorrows, and
inequalities--the meaning of this tide of life itself that rolls in
endless succession through these stony arteries--does it perplex you?
Accept, then, the help which religion gives by interpreting it as only
preliminary and transitional; only a portion of a wider scheme.

We commenced this series of discourses by standing, as it were, in the
street, on a level with all these phases of humanity. Ascend now some
lofty post of observation; some high watch-tower. The mottled tide flows
and dashes far below you. The sounds of strife and endeavor rise faintly
to your ears, and are drowned in the upper air. So in the altitude and
comprehensiveness of faith, all this that seemed so huge and startling
dwindles to a little stream in the great ocean of existence, and all
these tumults are swallowed up in the currents of silent but beneficent
design. But, in the meantime, the daylight has gone, the night-shadow
has fallen, this stream of human life has ebbed away, and all these
sounds are still. See, now, how much o