nt, to embrace the whole spiritual life. I am sure
that He is revealing to us the secret of happy living which lies at the
very heart of His gospel, when He says: If ye know these things, happy
are ye if ye do them.

i. "If ye know,"--there is, then, a certain kind of knowledge without
which we can not be happy. There are questions arising in human nature
which demand an answer. If it is denied we can not help being
disappointed, restless, and sad. This is the price we have to pay for
being conscious, rational creatures. If we were mere plants or animals
we might go on living through our appointed years in complete
indifference to the origin and meaning of our existence. But within us,
as human beings, there is something that cries out and rebels against
such a blind life. Man is born to ask what things mean. He is possessed
with the idea that there is a significance in the world beyond that
which meets his senses.

John Fiske has brought out this fact very clearly in his last book,
Through Nature to God. He shows that "in the morning twilight of
existence the Human Soul vaguely reached forth toward something akin to
itself, not in the realm of fleeting phenomena, but in the Eternal
Presence beyond." He argues by the analogy of evolution, which always
presupposes a real relation between the life and the environment to
which it adjusts itself, that this forth-reaching and unfolding of the
soul implies the everlasting reality of religion.

The argument is good. But the point which concerns us now is simply
this. The forth-reaching, questioning soul can never be satisfied if it
touches only a dead wall in the darkness, if its seeking meets with the
reply, "You do not know, and you never can know, and you must not try
to know." This is agnosticism. It is only another way of spelling
unhappiness.

"Since Christianity is not true," wrote Ernest Renan, "nothing interests
me, or appears worthy my attention." That is the logical result of
losing the knowledge of spiritual things,--a life without real interest,
without deep worth,--a life with a broken spring.

But suppose Renan is mistaken. Suppose Christianity is true. Then the
first thing that makes it precious, is that it answers our questions,
and tells us the things that we must know in order to be happy.

Christianity is a revealing religion, a teaching religion, a religion
which conveys to the inquiring spirit certain great and positive
solutions of the problems of