through the night. These two, in all times, among all
races, under ten thousand divinities, have been the voices of the heart.

"There is a third mood of direct experience by which one approaches the
religious life. Surely no man in our civilization can grow far in years
without finding out that, in the effort to live a life obeying his
desires and worthy of his hopes, his will is made one with Christ's
commands; and he knows that the promises of Christ, so far as they
relate to the life that now is, are fulfilled in himself day by day; he
can escape neither the ideal that Christ was, nor the wisdom of Christ
in respect to the working of that ideal on others and within himself. He
perceives the evil of the world, and desires to share in its redemption;
its sufferings, and would remove them; its injustice, and would abolish
it. He is, by the mere force of his own heart in view of mankind, a
humanitarian. But he is more than this in such a life. If he be sincere,
he has not lived long before he knows in himself such default of duty
that he recognizes it as the soul's betrayal; its times and occasions,
its degrees of responsibility, its character whether of mere frailty or
of an evil will, its greater or less offence, are indifferent matters;
for, as it is the man of perfect honour who feels a stain as a wound,
and a shadow as a stain, so poignancy of repentance is keenest in the
purest souls. It is death that is dull, it is life that is quick. It may
well be, in the world's history in our time, that the suffering caused
in the good by slight defections from virtue far overbalances the
general remorse felt for definite and habitual crime. Thus none--those
least who are most hearts of conscience--escapes this emotion, known in
the language of religion as conviction of sin. It is the earliest moral
crisis of the soul; it is widely felt,--such is the nature and such the
circumstances of men; and, as a man meets it in that hour, as he then
begins to form the habit of dealing with his failures sure to come, so
runs his life to the end save for some great change. If then some
restoring power enters in, some saving force, whether it be from the
memory and words of Christ, or from the example of those lives that
were lived in the spirit of that ideal, or from nearer love and more
tender affection enforcing the supremacy of duty and the hope of
struggle,--in whatever way that healing comes, it is well; and, just as
the man of honest