r the care of a forest hind, supposed
himself to belong to the rude class among whom he lived; but one
day, learning his true parentage, he knew beneath his mean
disguise that he was a prince, and immediately claimed his
kingdom. These facts of experience show clearly how much it
behooves us to cultivate by every honest method this cardinal
tenet of religion, how much wiser faith is in listening to the
lucid echoes of the sky than despair in listening to the muffled
reverberations of the grave. All noble and sweet beliefs grow with
the growing nobleness and tenderness of characters sensitive to
those fine revealings which pachydermatous souls can never know.
In the upper hall of reason, before the high shrine of faith, burn
the base doubts begotten in the cellars of sense; and they may
serve as tapers to light your tentative way to conviction. If the
floating al Sirat between physiology and psychology, earth and
heaven, is too slippery and perilous for your footing, where heavy
limbed science cannot tread, nerve the wings of faith for a free
flight. Or, if every effort to fasten a definite theory on some
solid support on the other side of the gulf fails, venture forth
on the naked line of limitless desire, as the spider escapes from
an unwelcome position by flinging out an exceedingly long and fine
thread and going forth upon it sustained by the air.50 Whoever
preserves the full intensity of the affections is little likely to
lose his trust in God and a future life, even when exposed to
lowering and chilling influences from material science and
speculative philosophy: the glowing of the heart, as Jean Paul
says, relights the extinguished torch in the night of the
intellect, as a beast stunned by an electric shock in the head is
restored by an electric shock in the breast. Daniel Webster says,
in an expression of his faith in Christianity written shortly
before his death, "Philosophical argument, especially that drawn
from the vastness of the universe in comparison with the apparent
insignificance of this globe, has sometimes shaken my reason for
the faith which is in me; but my heart has always assured and
reassured me."51 Contemplating the stable permanence of nature as
it swallows our fleet generations, we may feel that we vanish like
sparks in the night; but when we think of the persistent identity
of the soul, and of its immeasurable superiority to the brute mass
of matter, the aspect of the case changes and the mo