onsidered we claim such faith
to be most rational, most natural. God, spirit, immortality, instead
of being inconsistent with what we know, are what we most legitimately
deduce from it,--what we might expect from the light that trembles
behind the curtain of mystery which bounds all our sensuous knowledge.
We do believe, the veriest skeptic believes in something behind that
curtain of mystery; nor can he withhold his faith because it attaches to
that which is unseen and incomprehensible, without, as has already
been shown, cutting every nerve that binds us to practical life, and
smothering every suggestion that speaks from outward nature. If he do
not believe in a God, then, or in Christ, or in immortality, let him not
sneer at others because they walk by faith and not by sight; for he also
must do so, though his faith be not in such high truths, such spiritual
realities.

The Christian's faith is an Infinite Father and an immortal life, and
though he cannot see them, cannot come in material contact with them, he
believes them to be the greatest of all realities, and he sees them by
faith, a medium as legitimate as that of sight. They are mysteries,
but everything contains a mystery; they demand of him what every day's,
every hour's events demand of him--faith. Let us understand, however,
that faith is not the surrendering of our minds to that which is
irrational and inconsistent. These terms should not be confounded with
the mysterious and the incomprehensible. That the earth moves and yet
stands still is not a proposition that demands faith. It is in the
province of reason to say that it cannot move and stand still at the
same time. It is an inconsistency. But how the earth moves on its axis,
what is that law that makes it move, is an incomprehensibility. An
incomprehensibility is one thing, an inconsistency is another thing.
The one conflicts with our reason, the other is beyond it. In that which
conflicts with our reason we cannot have faith, but as to that which is
beyond it we exercise faith every day; for we literally walk by faith
and not by sight.

Who shall say, then, that God, immortality, and those high truths
revealed by Jesus, are inconsistent? Do they not conform to the highest
reason? Do not our deepest intuitions demand that these revelations
should be true? Consult your nature, examine your own heart, consider
what you are, what you want, what you feel, deeply want, keenly feel,
and then say whether