ho lived, perhaps, long ago, who had the most
limited natural knowledge, who had the most erroneous conceptions about
many important matters,--we shall find that this art, and poetry, and
eloquence, have, in fact, not only the power of refreshing and
delighting us, they have also the power,--such is the strength and
worth, in essentials, of their author's criticism of life,--they have a
fortifying, and elevating, and quickening, and suggestive power, capable
of wonderfully helping us to relate the results of modern science to our
need for conduct, our need for beauty."

Life has a tendency to become far too "strenuous" with the best one can
do, even; and the need is not for greater pressure of intensity, but for
greater receptivity of intellectual and spiritual refreshment; for a
calmer trust and a loftier faith.

The joy of faith in its inspiration and emotion is wonderfully renewed
from the Divine Word. "The Lord shall be unto thee an everlasting
light, and thy God thy glory." The gospels are full of these positive
and radiant assurances that invest faith with the most absolute joy of
confidence and positiveness of trust. These assurances meet the eye and
enter the heart with the certainty of a personal message, directly given
from God. And it is in this realm of the higher thought, of that culture
of the soul which is the true object and aim of the temporary life on
earth, that the relief from the too strenuous pressure of affairs must
be found. The human soul is so constituted that it cannot live unless it
breathes its native air of inspiration and joy and divineness. It is
stifled in the "strenuous" lower life, its energies are paralyzed unless
it seek renewal at the divine springs. It is this strenuousness of
latter-day life, unrelieved by love and by prayer; unrelieved by the
spiritual luxury of loving service and outgoing thought; this strenuous
attitude, intent on getting and greed and gain and personal advantage,
that, at last, ends in the discords and the crimes, the despair and the
suicides, whose records fill the daily press. The cure for all these
ills is to be found only in the higher life of conduct and of beauty.
"Thou shalt show me the way of life: Thou shalt make me full of joy
with Thy countenance." Here, and here alone, is the cure, the relief,
the leading into peace and serenity and exaltation. It is not that the
"fierce energy" of life is in excess, but that its application is in
wrong and unmean