but faith, do you not see, based in reality, springing
out of experience, and so a purely rational act of the mind.

Let me give you one illustration of the scientific use of faith, very
striking, beautiful, as it seems to me. The only time Mr. Huxley was in
this country, I happened to be in New York, and heard him give the
opening one of a brief course of three lectures in Chickering Hall. He
was very much interested then in the ancestry of the horse. Most of you
are probably aware of the fact that they have traced its ancestry to a
little creature having five toes, like ordinary animals. At the time
that Mr. Huxley was here, one link in this chain was missing; that is,
one of the forms in the line of the horse's ancestors had not been
discovered.

But here, for example, was the first one and the second one, we say,
and the third one was missing, and here was the fourth one, and here
was the horse itself. Now, in the light of the presumable uniformity of
nature, Mr. Huxley went on to describe this missing animal. He said, if
the remains of this creature are ever found, they will be so and so;
and he went into an accurate detailed explanation as to what sort of
creature it would be. He had not been at his home in England a year
before Professor Marsh, of Yale College, discovered this missing link
in Colorado, and it answered precisely to the description which
Professor Huxley had beforehand given of it.

Now here is a case of scientific prophecy, scientific faith, a faith
based on previous scientific observations, based on the experienced
uniformity of nature. Mr. Huxley did not know, he could not have known;
but he believed. He believed in the universe, he believed in the sanity
of the universe, he believed in the uniformity, the order, the beauty
of the universe; and the result justified his faith.

Faith, then, is a purely rational faculty. It has nothing to do with
the past, but is always the evidence of things hoped for, the substance
of something not yet seen. It is always looking along the lines of
possible experience for something as possibly or probably to be.

Now at the end I wish to suggest a few things that are in the rightful
province and field of faith, fields where we can fearlessly exercise
this grand faculty, where indeed we must exercise it if we are to
achieve the highest and finest results in the world.

And, in the first place, quoting the words of the old writer, let me
say, "Have faith in