he love of beauty finds beauty everywhere. The love of
living creatures finds objects everywhere, and love given brings love
in response. This higher life gives joy,--not constant, alternating
with sorrow; but the joy is incomparably sweeter and purer and higher
than any other course of life yields, and the sorrow has such nobility
that we dare not wish it absent from the mingled cup we drain. And
always through joy or sorrow may come moral growth--development of
character.

There is no exemption to be won from suffering, none from fear. Pain,
weakness, bereavement, death,--these things must come, and we must
sometimes tremble before them,--no divine hand will pluck them away.
But in our fear we learn a deeper strength.

These are the gifts with which Life answers our faithful service. The
brave, the gentle, the peace-makers, the pure in heart, the forgiving,
the patient, the heroic, are blessed,--incomparably enriched.

This is what we know of the relation of the One Power to
ourselves,--that it asks the very highest and best we can give, and
returns our service with the best and highest we can receive. This is
what that power we name God is to us.

This is the same reality which has been apprehended under the figure of
a personal God, a Heavenly Father, or a Christ. To many, those figures
still express it. But those to whom the Deity is not thus personified
may no less fully and vividly apprehend the divine Reality.

And further, this whole conception stands no less in stead the persons
and the hours when the conscious sense of Deity fails altogether. This
conception makes the essence of religion to be conformity to the homely
facts about us, in the relations of fidelity, sympathy, and service.
When one has no conscious thought of God, or cannot reach such thought
if he tries, he can always exercise love, sympathy, admiration,
self-control,--and that is enough.

The limitations of our knowledge imply everywhere a background of
mystery. But that mystery is at once a stimulus to our inquiry and a
prize set before our longing. In some respects it is only a challenge
to search, and the horizons of knowledge forever widen before the
explorer. At other points the veil never lifts, but all longing,
aspiration, unsatisfied hunger, inarticulate yearning, "groanings which
cannot be uttered," reach out to and lay hold on this realm of mystery.
It is not an adamantine wall that encircles us, it is the tender
my