purpose is the same--to
establish the individual in a satisfactory relation to the Divine Power.
The very fact of any religious profession at all implies the recognition
of God as the Source of life and of all that goes to make life; and
therefore the purpose in every case is to draw increasing degrees of
life, whether here or hereafter, from the Only Source from which alone
it is to be obtained, and therefore to establish such a relation with
this Source as may enable the worshipper to draw from It all the life he
wants. Hence the necessary preliminary to drawing consciously at all is
the confidence that such a relation actually has been established; and
such a confidence as this is exactly all that is meant by Faith.

The position of the man who has not this confidence is either that no
such Source exists, or else that he is without means of access to It;
and in either case he feels himself left to fight for his own hand
against the entire universe without the consciousness of any Superior
Power to back him up. He is thrown entirely upon his own resources, not
knowing of the interior spring from which they may be unceasingly
replenished. He is like a plant cut off at the stem and stuck in the
ground without any root, and consequently that spiritual blight of which
George Eliot speaks creeps over him, producing weakness, perplexity, and
fear, with all their baleful consequences, where there should be that
strength, order, and confidence which are the very foundation of all
building-up for whatever purpose, whether of personal prosperity or of
usefulness to others.

From the point of view of those who are acquainted with the laws of
spiritual life, such a man is cut off from the root of his own Being.
Beyond and far interior to that outer self which each of us knows as the
intellectual man working with the physical brain as instrument, we have
roots penetrating deep into that Infinite of which, in our ordinary
waking state, we are only dimly conscious; and it is through this root
of our own individuality, spreading far down into the hidden depths of
Being, that we draw out of the unseen that unceasing stream of Life
which afterwards, by our thought-power, we differentiate into all those
outward forms of which we have need. Hence the unceasing necessity for
every one to realise the great truth that his whole individuality has
its foundation in such a root, and that the ground in which this root
is embedded is that Unive