it is, without a care whether it be a beautiful or
an ugly, a sweet or a bitter truth. The fact is what it is, and nothing
can be gained by believing it to be what it is not.

This is a most wise and human way of looking at things, if men will only
not forget that the mind sees farther than the eye, that the heart feels
deeper than the hand; and that where knowledge fails, faith is left;
where possession is denied, hope remains. The young must enter upon
their life-work with the conviction that only what is real is true,
good, and beautiful; and that the unreal is altogether futile and vain.

Now, the most real thing for every man, if he is a man, is his own soul.
His thought, his love, his faith, his hope, are but his soul thinking,
loving, believing, hoping. His joy and misery are but his soul glad or
sad. Hence, so far as we are able to see or argue, the essence of
reality is spiritual; and since the soul is conscious that it is not the
supreme reality, but is dependent, illumined by a truth higher than
itself, nourished by a love larger than its own, it has a dim vision of
the Infinite Being as essentially real and essentially spiritual. A
living faith in this infinite spiritual reality is the fountain-head not
only of religion, but of noble life. All wavering here is a symptom of
psychic paralysis. When the infinite reality becomes questionable, then
all things become material and vile. The world becomes a world of sight
and sound, of taste and touch. The soul is poured through the senses and
dissipated; the current of life stagnates, and grows fetid in sloughs
and marshes. Minds for whom God is the Unknowable have no faith in
knowledge at all, except as the equivalent of weight and measure, of
taste and touch and smell.

Now, if all that may be known and desired is reduced to this material
expression, how dull and beggarly does not life become,--mere atomic
integration and disintegration, the poor human pneumatic-machine purring
along the dusty road of matter, bound and helpless and soulless as a
clanking engine! No high life, in individuals or nations, is to be hoped
for, unless it is enrooted in the infinite spiritual reality,--in God.
It is forever indubitable that the highest is not material, and no
argument is therefore needed to show that when spiritual ideals lose
their power of attraction, life sinks to lower beds.

Sight is the noblest sense, and the starlit sky is the most sublime
object we can behold