April furrow the field of waving wheat. The faith _grows_ in the
individual and in the race, under that culture to which the higher powers
subject us,--a culture in which the elements are experience and fidelity,
thought and action, love and loss, aspiration and achievement. Love and
Loss, the sweetest angel and the sternest one, join their hands to give
us that gift of the immortal hope.

If one asks, How shall I gain faith in God and hope of immortality? what
better answer can we give him than this: Be faithful, live, and love!
Work and love press their treasures on you with full hands. Open your
eyes to the glory of the universe. Watch the world's new life quickening
in bud and bird-song. Get into sympathetic current with the hearts
around you. Be sincere; be a man. Keep open-minded to all knowledge,
and keep humble in the sense of your ignorance. Seek the company that
ennobles, the scenes that ennoble, the books that ennoble. In your
darkest hour, set yourself to brighten another's life. Be patient. If
an oak-tree takes a century to get its growth, shall a man expect to win
his crown in a day? Find what word of prayer you can sincerely say, and
say it with your heart. Look at the moral meanings of things. Learn to
feel through your own littleness that higher power out of which comes all
the good in you. Join yourself to men wherever you can find them in that
noblest attitude, true worship of a living God. Know that to mankind are
set two teachers of immortality, and see to it that you so faithfully
learn of Love that Sorrow when she comes shall perfect the lesson.

Love in its simplest and most common forms is often strangely wise. Many
a mother learns from the light of her baby's eyes more than all wisdom of
books can teach. When the little, unconscious thing is taken from her
arms, there is given to her sometimes a feeling, "My baby is _mine_
forever;" a feeling in whose presence we stand in reverent, tender awe.
It is not every experience of bereavement which brings with it this
uplift of comfort. But to the noble love of a noble object there comes
the sense of something in the beloved that outlasts death. To the
_noble_ love, for most of our affection has a selfish strain in it; the
clinging to another for what of present enjoyment he yields to us brings
small illumination or assurance. But as self loses itself in another's
life, there comes to us the deep instinct of something over which d