the Revelation of a God, a Father, and an immortal
life, satisfies you as nothing else can. Take them away, and would there
not be a dreary and overwhelming void? And because you have not seen
God, because you have not realized immortality, because they reach
beyond your present vision, because the grave shuts you in, because they
are high and transcendent truths, will you reject them? Do so, and try
to walk by sight alone. With that nature of yours, so full of love, with
that intellect of yours so limitless in capacity, you are apparently a
child of the elements, a thing of physical nature, born of the dust,
and returning to it. With desires that reach out beyond the stars, with
faculties that in this life just begin to bud, with affections whose
bleeding tendrils cling around the departed, wrestle with death, and say
to the grave, "Give up the dead! they are not thine, but mine; I
feel they must be mine forever," with all these desires, capacities,
affections, you walk--so far as mere sight helps you--among graves and
decay, with nothing more enduring, nothing better, than three-score
years and ten, the clods of the valley, the crumbling bone, and
the dissolving dust! Because God and immortality are mysterious,
incomprehensible, reject them, and walk only by sight? The humblest
outpouring of human affection rebukes thy skepticism; the most narrow
degree of human intellect prophesies beyond all this; the darkest heart,
with that spark of eternal life, the yearning that moves beneath all
its sensualities, and speaks for better, for more enduring things,--that
rebukes thee; and in man's moral nature, in his heart and his mind,
there is that which only can be satisfied, only can be explained by
God and immortality. They alone, then, are rational, they alone have
comprehensive vision, who walk by faith, and not by sight.

Mystery and faith, then; let what we have said concerning these be not
alone for the skeptic, but for the Christian who has faith but cannot
fully justify and confirm it, or who feels it faltering under some heavy
burden, or who is overwhelmed by the magnitude of the truths to which
it attaches, or who wishes, with a kind of half-doubt, that these things
might be seen and felt. They are great, they are incomprehensibly great;
but are they therefore untrue? Does not your heart of hearts tell you
they are true? Does not that Revelation of Christ steal into your soul
and feed it, satisfy it, as nothing else c