type of family life, our forms of civil society, and our republican state.

You need only recall our studies of Dante to revive your realizing sense of the truth that faith is the beating heart of the body corporate. What a revelation it was to us when we understood why the circles of fraud were placed lower in the Inferno than the circles of violence! Were robbery, tyranny, murder, suicide really less heinous offences than flattery, hypocrisy, thieving, simony, and political prostitution? Was fraud so hateful to God because it "dissevers the bond of love which Nature makes," and striking at combination breaks the tie that unites the world? Was treachery the blackest of sins because it not only loosed the tie of universal brotherhood, but sundered the closer and more spiritual cords woven by free choices of the will? Was all sin in essence the attack of will upon will, and was violence a sin of less degree than fraud because its attack was merely external? Was fraud the slaughter of will by will, the murder of spirit by spirit? Conversely, if faith were the living cord which bound all individuals into one great humanity, and made possible the hierarchy of human institutions, was not the nurture of faith the beginning

of all true education, and was it not the prime duty of the educator to win faith by deserving it?

How

You will remember how with whole hearts we learned to affirm these truths as we studied the great poet who has painted every deed of man in the perspective of its consequences, but I think you will agree with me that we did not in those old days fully realize that faith in fellowmen is as necessary to our intellectual as it is to our ethical life. very few of the myriad objects in the world does any one individual have the opportunity to perceive! How misleading must be his perceptions even of these numerically insignificant objects unless by comparing his own results with those of others he learns to subtract the errors and exaggerations he has unwittingly contributed. A child's unguided examination of the simplest object will almost invariably center about non-essential qualities, and leading him to search for essential qualities simply means that you are helping him to correct his own perceptions, by the perceptions and reflections of others. We depend upon reports of our fellowmen for by far the greater part of our knowledge of sensible objects, and it is also through our fellows that we learn to perceive aright even

the few with which we come into immediate contact. Unless we believed their reports we should not try to verify them. So rising to higher planes of mental activity it is because we believe that men are able to draw from experience valid inferences, and to discover beneath experience valid presuppositions, that we exert our powers of understanding and strive to recreate their insights. In their light we see light, and through seeing our intellectual eye grows strong. Evidently, therefore, faith is both the condition of mental enlargement and the source of mental activity.*

The dialectic of faith forces us to higher planes of thought, and I want you now to consider that the active pursuit of knowledge has a root deeper even than trust in fellowmen. Have you ever wondered why Asia has no science? or connected this defect with the fact that to the Oriental mind Nature is Maia or illusion—a phenomenon without a noumenon, a manifestation without any essence which it manifests? The apparent universe is only an evil dream. Why, then, give oneself the trouble to learn anything about it. Rather let the

* Psychologic Foundations of Education, by W. T. Harris, Int. Edu. Series, pp. 74, 75.

devout mind waken from its nightmare and learn the restful truths that Brahma is nothingness and Nirvana extinction.

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We owe to Professor Huxley a candid admission of the fact that all science presupposes belief in the reality and intelligibility of Nature. In his view, the one act of faith in the convert to science is confession of the universality of order, and the absolute validity in all times and under all circumstances of the law of causation." Differently

stated, we search for law and order in Nature because we believe they will be found there, and to believe that law and order exist in Nature is implicitly to affirm that Nature is the product of an ordering intelligence. Sir John Herschel once said,

It is but reasonable to regard the force of gravitation as the direct or indirect result of a consciousness or will existing somewhere." His remark applies not only to all forces, but to all laws which are really only the forms under which forces act, and unless we are ready to admit that scienec is merely a "lucid madness occupied in tabulating its own necessary hallucinations," we must recognize in the outer world the expression of an outer mind. All poetry, art, and philosophy imply the

same truth, and it was because Greece attained first to the faith and later to the insight that there is a personal core to the universe, that she became the fountain head of these highest forms of spiritual activity.

I have said nothing about faith as the prompting motive of religion, both because in this sphere its paramount importance is generally admitted, and because I believe that by recognizing its power in other domains of life we shall the more readily understand why without faith it is impossible to please God. Is there a keener stab than distrust, and if we who merit only partial faith are so hurt by doubt what must He feel who alone is worthy of absolute confidence? God has been called "the great Misunderstood," and we begin to comprehend His eternal cross and passion when we reflect that every doubt is a mortal thrust at the heart of love.

I said in the beginning of this letter that faith presupposes experience. I must now add that it is a generous venture of the soul beyond experience. It is the divination of a secret of which all experience is but a partial disclosure. It is the active instinct of sonship and brotherhood. It is heart insight, an impulsive leap of the individual toward