e, how shall we tell
whether or no it concern itself with the interests of our race? The
probable futility of our life and our species is a truth which regards
us indirectly only, and may well, therefore, be left in suspense. The
other truth, that indicates clearly the importance of life, may perhaps
be more restricted, but it has a direct, incontestable, actual bearing
upon ourselves. To sacrifice or even subordinate it to an alien truth
must surely be wrong. The first truth should never be lost sight of;
it will strengthen and illumine the second, whose government will thus
become more intelligent and benign: the first truth will teach us to
profit by all that the second does not include. And if we allow it to
sadden our heart or arrest our action, we have not sufficiently
realised that the vast but precarious space it fills in the region of
important truths is governed by countless problems which as yet are
unsolved; while the problems whereon the second truth rests are daily
resolved by real life. The first truth is still in the dangerous,
feverish stage, through which all truths must pass before they can
penetrate freely into our heart and our brain; a stage of jealousy,
truculence, which renders the neighbourhood of another truth
insupportable to them. We must wait till the fever subsides; and if
the home that we have prepared in our spirit be sufficiently spacious
and lofty, we shall find very soon that the most contradictory truths
will be conscious only of the mysterious bond that unites them, and
will silently join with each other to place in the front rank of all,
and there help and sustain, that truth from among them which calmly
went on with its work while the others were fretfully jangling; that
truth which can do the most good, and brings with it the uttermost hope.

The strangest feature of the present time is the confusion which reigns
in our instincts and feelings--in our ideas, too, save at our most
lucid, most tranquil, most thoughtful moments--on the subject of the
intervention of the unknown or mysterious in the truly grave events of
life. We find, amidst this confusion, feelings which no longer accord
with any precise, living, accepted idea; such, for instance, as concern
the existence of a determinate God, conceived as more or less
anthropomorphic, providential, personal, and unceasingly vigilant. We
find feelings which, as yet, are only partially ideas; as those which
deal with fatali