te
encounter with realities, without leaning on any explanation. It is
the onlooker only who despairs. Literature, so much the work of
on-lookers, exaggerates the depression. Men of action, toilers,
helpers, fathers, mothers, saints,--these do not despair. The world as
a whole, and the best part of the world, lives a life of action,
feeling, exercise of every faculty,--which generates courage, strength,
tenderness. Under all the confusion and wrong, there are still the
deep springs of that same experience, that "peace of God" which always
fed the highest life.

There is an experience sometimes felt of perfect assurance, peace, and
joy. It is "love which casteth out fear,"--the sense of being "God's
child;" it is communion with the Highest.

This is the heart of religion. It is known to "babes and sucklings,"
unknown to many otherwise very learned people. It speaks with an
absolute authority the message of love and peace, of joy and hope.

The mind is wont to clothe this message in some crude form, which
serves to convey it to others, but is like the alloy which makes the
pure gold workable, yet debases it.

This gladness of the spirit was the gospel of Jesus. He had it as no
one ever had it before. His followers caught it. They debased,
necessarily, but they spread it. They worshiped it in him, made him
their leader, master, and finally their God. They loved him as a
present reality, while they treasured the record of his human words.
In such exaltation, like the intoxication of a heavenly wine, the
untrained mind is creative in its ecstasy; hence the beautifully
conceived and easily believed stories of announcing angels, miracles of
healing, bodily resurrection.

Then came a long development of dogma and church,--much of obscuration,
much of degeneracy. Through it all survived the truths that love is
supreme, and that the law of life is goodness sublimed to holiness.

The revivals of religions have been the rediscovery of the glad truth,
freed each time from some accompanying error.

The discovery of Luther was that the soul's life in God was possible
outside of the Catholic church. Others had found this, too, but he
made it a militant truth, and successfully revolted.

Calvinism was partly a reversion; its emphasis on sovereignty was
tyrannical, but it trained the mind in exact and intense thought.

Fox, after long searchings amid sects and parties, made the new
discovery again,--God's spirit