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arriving at truth. He must take them at first on trust from 
other men, and then by diligent application of them to 
phenomena he will arrive at an independent conviction of their 
accuracy. Such is eminently the case with religious truth. 
He who scoffs at it as absurd will remain, as long as he does 
so, a stranger to the knowledge of the Unseen. He who 
accepts it on the authority of persons he can trust will find 
continually, as he applies it to the facts of existence, fresh 
reasons for acknowledging its truth. Like all other know- 
ledge, it passes from the stage of belief on authority, through 
that of experimental inquiry, into that of rational conviction. 
If this be said to be contrary to facts, it may be replied that 
such contradiction is only apparent. Those who have made 
shipwreck of their faith have usually done so at the very 
moment when they were first in a condition to act independently 
and intelligently upon the principles they had been taught. 
Instead of applying those principles to practice, and thus 
ascertaining whether they were an adequate solution of the 
problems of life, they have demanded to investigate the whole 
question, ab initio , for themselves. Life is not long enough 
for such a process. Those who undertake it must not be 
surpiised if life be wasted in it, if the arrogance which treats 
with contempt the experience of other men should need a 
bitter lesson to convince it that no man in this world can 
venture to stand alone. It is a most significant fact, the 
practical importance of which cannot be overrated, that no 
man has taken the doctrines of Christianity as a basis for 
conduct, and acted upon them consistently for a long series of 
years, and has been forced at the end to confess that they have 
failed. Thousands, on the other hand, have recoiled from the 
abyss of uncertainty which lies before them in the shape of 
Agnosticism. It is not logic, it is the result of experiment, 
which makes a man of mature age a Christian, and keeps 
him so. The feeling that something more than a negative con- 
ception of God as the Unknowable is necessary to support him 
through the perplexities and sorrows of life, may often be the 
means of leading him to embrace revealed religion. But 
experience does not lead him to surrender his new convic- 
tions as delusive. Bather do those convictions gather strength 
as life advances, and as fresh demonstrations of Eternal 
Wisdom and Love open out upon the soul. And so, as in the 
lapse of the ages it continues to store up within the limits of 
its experience new “ manifestations 33 of the Divine, it passes 
gradually from the “knowledge in part^ which characterises 
our existence here, to that “ knowledge even as we are known , ,3 
which constitutes the perfeption of humanity. 
