al beings, or are we not? That is the decisive question, which we
must say our Yes or No to. If, with our eyes open, and with all our
hearts, it be given us to say Yes--to say Yes without fear, and firmly,
and in the face of everything--then there will be little more to fear.
We shall have fought the good fight, we shall have kept the faith; and
whatever we lack more, will without doubt be added to us. From this
belief in ourselves we shall pass to the belief in God, as its only
rational basis and its only emotional completion; and, perhaps, from a
belief in God, to a recognition of His audible voice amongst us. But at
any rate, whatever after-difficulties beset us, they will not be new
difficulties; only those we had braved at first, showing themselves more
clearly.

But that first decision--how shall we make it? Who or what shall help
us, or give us counsel? There is no evidence that can do so in the
sensible world around us. The universe, as positive thought approaches
it, is blind and dumb about it. Science and history are sullen, and
blind, and dumb. They await upon our decision before they will utter a
single word to us: and that decision, if we have a will at all, it lies
with our own will--with our will alone, to make. It may, indeed, be said
that the will has to create itself by an initial exercise of itself, in
an assent to its own existence. If it can do this, one set of obstacles
is surmounted; but others yet confront us. The world into which the
moral will has borne itself--not a material world, but a spiritual--a
world which the will's existence alone makes possible, this world is not
silent, like the other, but it is torn and divided against itself, and
is resonant with unending contradictions. Its first aspect is that of a
place of torture, a hell of the intellect, in which reason is to be
racked for ever by a tribe of sphinx-like monsters, themselves
despairing. Good and evil inhabit there, confronting each other, for
ever unreconciled: _there_ is omnipotent power baffled, and omnipotent
mercy unexercised. Is the will strong enough to hold on through this
baffling and monstrous world, and not to shrink back and bid the vision
vanish? Can we still resolve to say, 'I believe, although it is
impossible'? Is the will to assert our own moral nature--our own
birthright in eternity, strong enough to bear us on?

The trial is a hard one, and whilst we doubt and hesitate under it the
universal silence of the va