hardly-won victory in themselves
of right over wrong--in the thousand and one sudden appeals made
without warning to that compass of a man's life, Conscience--and in
those brilliant and startling impulses of generosity, bravery, and
self-sacrifice which carry us on, heedless of consequences, to the
performance of great and noble deeds, whose fame makes the whole world
one resounding echo of glory--deeds that we wonder at ourselves even in
the performance of them--acts of heroism in which mere life goes for
nothing, and the Soul for a brief space is pre-eminent, obeying blindly
the guiding influence of a something akin to itself, yet higher in the
realms of Thought.

There are no proofs as to why such things should be; but that they are,
is indubitable. The miracles enacted now are silent ones, and are
worked in the heart and mind of man alone. Unbelief is nearly supreme
in the world to-day. Were an angel to descend from heaven in the middle
of a great square, the crowd would think he had got himself up on
pulleys and wires, and would try to discover his apparatus. Were he, in
wrath, to cast destruction upon them, and with fire blazing from his
wings, slay a thousand of them with the mere shaking of a pinion, those
who were left alive would either say that a tremendous dynamite
explosion had occurred, or that the square was built on an extinct
volcano which had suddenly broken out into frightful activity. Anything
rather than believe in angels--the nineteenth century protests against
the possibility of their existence. It sees no miracle--it pooh-poohs
the very enthusiasm that might work them.

"Give a positive sign," it says; "prove clearly that what you say is
true, and I, in spite of my Progress and Atom Theory, will believe."
The answer to such a request was spoken eighteen hundred years and more
ago. "A faithless and perverse generation asketh for a sign, and no
sign shall be given unto them."

Were I now to assert that a sign had been given to ME--to me, as one
out of the thousands who demand it--such daring assurance on my part
would meet with the most strenuous opposition from all who peruse the
following pages; each person who reads having his own ideas on all
subjects, and naturally considering them to be the best if not the only
ideas worth anything. Therefore I wish it to be plainly understood that
in this book I personally advocate no new theory of either religion or
philosophy; nor do I hold myself answ