the constant requirement, the unsparing hourly need, is obedience to
the known right. The sequence is an ever-widening sense of a sweet and
celestial encompassment.

The man rightly practiced in all noble exercises of life--in moral
fidelity, in reverence and sympathy, in observation and conformity to
the actual conditions of the world about him--will find pouring in upon
him a beauty, a love, a divinity, which fill the soul with a heavenly
vision. And that soul, in whatever of extremity may come to it, has
under its feet the eternal rock.

Through the serious literature of to-day runs a bitter wail,--the cry
that life is sad and dark and cruel. Sad and dark and cruel it is,
until one meets it sword in hand. The great Mother will have her
children to be heroes. She tests them, frightens them, masks herself
sometimes in terror. Face the terror, drive straight at the danger,
and the mask dissolves to show the celestial smile, the "all-repaying
eyes."

The road is an arduous one. The aged philosopher, you remember, was
asked by a youthful monarch, "Tell me if you please in a few words what
is the final fruit and outcome of philosophy?" The philosopher
answered him, "Cultivate yourself diligently in all virtue and wisdom
for thirty years, and then you may be able to partly understand the
answer to your question."

It is an arduous road, but it leads to reality. All short and easy
answers to the supreme question dissatisfy after the first flush. The
confidence of the dogmatic answer, we soon discover, has no sufficient
authority to back it. The glib theoretical answer leads us, after all,
to a Balance of Probabilities. That is the best God that theoretic
philosophy can give us. It may be better than nothing. But who can
love a Balance of Probabilities? Who can feel the hand of such a deity
as that when his hand gropes for support in face of temptation,
disaster, heartbreak?

We are told, "It may suffice for the strong and saintly to bid them
'Prove for yourself that the universe is good;' but what kind of gospel
is this for the weak, for the child, for the average man and woman?"
The answer is: The vast majority of mankind always have lived and
always will live largely by reliance on some person or some body of
persons or some social atmosphere of opinion. That authority of the
church which has availed so much is just the confidence of a crowd in
the leadership of certain men to whom they are accu