ble of an
infinity of applications. The fact is that faith is always the unknown
dimension. A man may know how many children he has, and how much money
he has; but no man knows how much faith he has. Everybody who has read
Carlyle's _History of Frederick the Great_ remembers the petty
squabbles of Voltaire, Maupertius, and the other thinkers who moved
about the person of that famous prince. They seemed to have been for
ever twitting each other with getting ill, and, notwithstanding their
philosophy, sending for a priest to minister beside their supposed
deathbeds. I have heard sceptics and infidels charged with hypocrisy
on the ground that, in the face of sudden terror, they had been known
to call upon that God whose very existence they denied. I am bound to
say that I do not think the evidence sufficient to substantiate the
charge. There was no hypocrisy, but the sudden discovery of
unsuspected faith. In the tumult of emotion induced by sudden fear, a
secret compartment of the soul was opened, and the faith that was
regarded as lost was found to be tranquilly reposing there.

Perhaps it was just as well that the lady in the tramcar had this
embarrassing experience. It was good for her to have felt the anguish
of imaginary loss, for it led her to discover that her purse was a more
complicated thing than she had supposed. It will do my friend of the
debating society a world of good to make the same discovery. The soul
is not so simple as it seems. You cannot press a spring at a given
moment, and take in all its contents at one glance. And it was
certainly good for my lady fellow traveller to find that the gold was
still there. She needed it, or its loss would not have thrown her into
such a fever. That is the thing that strikes me about my friend the
debater. He evidently needed the faith for which he cried so
passionately. Faith, like gold, is for use and not for ornament. Yes,
he needed the faith that he could not find; needed it, perhaps, more
sorely than he knew. And now that I have proved to him that, in some
secret recess, the treasure still lurks, I am hopeful that, like the
lady in the car, he will smile at his former anguish, and live like a
lord on the wealth that he has found.

IV

'SUCH A LOVELY BITE!'

It is a keen, clear, frosty winter's night, and I am sitting here in a
cheerfully lighted dining-room only a few feet from a roaring fire. An
immense chasm sometimes yawns betwee