APPLICATION OF FOREGOING PRINCIPLES. 69 



or in the waters under the earth. Truly if a man 

 have faith, even as a grain of mustard seed, though he 

 may not be able to remove mountains, he will at any 

 rate be able to do what is no less difficult — make a 

 mustard plant. 



Yet this is but a barren kind of comfort, for we 

 have not, and in the nature of things cannot have, 

 sufficient faith in the unfamiliar, inasmuch as the very 

 essence of faith involves the notion of familiarity, 

 which can grow but slowly, from experience to con- 

 fidence, and can make no sudden leap at any time. 

 Such faith cannot be founded upon reason, — that is to 

 say, upon a recognised perception on the part of the 

 person holding it that he is holding it, and of the 

 reasons for his doing so — or it will shift as other 

 reasons come to disturb it. A house built upon reason 

 is a house built upon the sand. It must be built 

 upon the current cant and practice of one's peers, for 

 this is the rock which, though not immovable, is still 

 most hard to move. 



But however this may be, we observe broadly 

 that the intensity of the will to make this or that, and 

 of the confidence that one can make it, depends upon 

 the length of time during which the maker's forefathers 

 have wanted the same thing before it ; the older the 

 custom the more inveterate the habit, and, with the 

 exception, perhaps, that the reproductive system is 

 generally the crowning act of development — an exception 

 which I will hereafter explain — the earlier its manifesta- 

 tion, until, for some reason or anothe r, we relinquish 

 it and take to another, which we must, as a general 



