our faith in an invisible order is what inspires those
efforts and that patience which make this visible order good for moral
men. Our faith in the seen world's goodness (goodness now meaning
fitness for successful moral and religious life) has verified itself by
leaning on our faith in the unseen world. But will our faith in the
unseen world similarly verify itself? Who knows?

Once more it is a case of _maybe_; and once more maybes are the essence
of the situation. I confess that I do not see why the very existence
of an invisible world may not in part depend on the personal response
which any one of us may make to the religious appeal. God himself, in
short, may draw vital strength and increase of very being from our
fidelity. For my own part, I do not know what the sweat and blood and
tragedy of this life mean, if they mean anything short of this. If
this life be not a real fight, in which something is eternally gained
for the universe by success, it is no better than a game of private
theatricals from which one may withdraw at will. But it _feels_ like a
real fight,--as if there were something really wild in the universe
which we, with all our idealities and faithfulnesses, are needed to
redeem; and first of all to redeem our own hearts from atheisms and
fears. For such a half-wild, half-saved universe our nature is
adapted. The deepest thing in our {62} nature is this _Binnenleben_
(as a German doctor lately has called it), this dumb region of the
heart in which we dwell alone with our willingnesses and
unwillingnesses, our faiths and fears. As through the cracks and
crannies of caverns those waters exude from the earth's bosom which
then form the fountain-heads of springs, so in these crepuscular depths
of personality the sources of all our outer deeds and decisions take
their rise. Here is our deepest organ of communication with the nature
of things; and compared with these concrete movements of our soul all
abstract statements and scientific arguments--the veto, for example,
which the strict positivist pronounces upon our faith--sound to us like
mere chatterings of the teeth. For here possibilities, not finished
facts, are the realities with which we have actively to deal; and to
quote my friend William Salter, of the Philadelphia Ethical Society,
"as the essence of courage is to stake one's life on a possibility, so
the essence of faith is to believe that the possibility exists."

These, then,