cism.
Both assurance and questioning appear to be necessary. Professor Royce
asserts that "a study of history shows that if there is anything that
human thought and cultivation have to be deeply thankful for, it is an
occasional, but truly great and fearless age of doubt." And in
individuals it is only by facing obstinate questionings that faith is
freed from folly and attains reasonableness.

Nor can religious experience, however boldly it claims to know, fail to
admit that its knowledge is but in part. Our knowledge of God, like the
knowledge we have of each other, is the insight born of familiarity; but
no man entirely knows his brother. And as for the Lord of heaven and
earth, how small a whisper do we hear of Him! Some minds are
constitutionally ill-adapted for fellowship with Him because they lack
what Keats calls "negative capability"--"that is, when a man is capable
of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable
reaching after fact and reason. Coleridge, for instance, would let go a
fine isolated verisimilitude, caught from the Penetralium of mystery,
from being incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge." We have
to trust God with His secrets, as well as try to penetrate them as far
as our minds will carry us. We have to accustom ourselves to look
uncomplainingly at darkness, while we walk obediently in the light.
"They see not clearliest who see all things clear."

But to many it seems all darkness, and the light is but a phantom of the
credulous. How do we know that we _know_, that the inference we draw
from our experience is correct, that we are in touch with a living God
who is to any extent what we fancy Him to be? Our experience consists of
emotions, impulses, aspirations, compunctions, resolves; we infer that
we are in communion with Another--the Christian God; but may not this
explanation of our experience be mistaken?

Religious experience is self-evidencing to the religious. God is as real
to the believer as beauty to the lover of nature on a June morning, or
to the artistic eye in the presence of a canvas by a great master. Men
are no more argued into faith than into an appreciation of lovely sights
and sounds; they are immediately and overwhelmingly aware of the
Invisible.

The rest may reason, and welcome; 'tis we musicians know.

Faith does not require authority; it confers it. To those who face the
Sistine Madonna, in the room in the Dresden Gallery where it ha