n or to
live for. Any one of these defects is fatal to its complete success.
Some one {126} will be sure to discover the flaw, to scout the system,
and to seek another in its stead.

I need not go far to collect examples to illustrate to an audience of
theologians what I mean. Nor will you in particular, as champions of
the Unitarianism of New England, be slow to furnish, from the motives
which led to your departure from our orthodox ancestral Calvinism,
instances enough under the third or practical head. A God who gives so
little scope to love, a predestination which takes from endeavor all
its zest with all its fruit, are irrational conceptions, because they
say to our most cherished powers, There is no object for you.

Well, just as within the limits of theism some kinds are surviving
others by reason of their greater practical rationality, so theism
itself, by reason of its practical rationality, is certain to survive
all lower creeds. Materialism and agnosticism, even were they true,
could never gain universal and popular acceptance; for they both,
alike, give a solution of things which is irrational to the practical
third of our nature, and in which we can never volitionally feel at
home. Each comes out of the second or theoretic stage of mental
functioning, with its definition of the essential nature of things, its
formula of formulas prepared. The whole array of active forces of our
nature stands waiting, impatient for the word which shall tell them how
to discharge themselves most deeply and worthily upon life. "Well!"
cry they, "what shall we do?" "Ignoramus, ignorabimus!" says
agnosticism. "React upon atoms and their concussions!" says
materialism. What a collapse! The mental train misses fire, the
middle fails to ignite the end, the cycle breaks down half-way to its
conclusion; and the active {127} powers left alone, with no proper
object on which to vent their energy, must either atrophy, sicken, and
die, or else by their pent-up convulsions and excitement keep the whole
machinery in a fever until some less incommensurable solution, some
more practically rational formula, shall provide a normal issue for the
currents of the soul.

Now, theism always stands ready with the most practically rational
solution it is possible to conceive. Not an energy of our active
nature to which it does not authoritatively appeal, not an emotion of
which it does not normally and naturally release the springs. A