e reason run. Its vulnerable point is pride. It is easily
encouraged by success, easily incited to conceit, readily inclined to
overestimate its power. It has a Chinese weakness for throwing up a wall
on its involuntary boundary-line, and for despising and defying all
that is beyond its jurisdiction. The reason may be the greatest or the
meanest faculty in the soul. It may be the most wise or the most foolish
of active things. It may be so profound as to acknowledge a whole
infinitude of truth which it cannot comprehend, or it may be so
superficial as to suspect everything it is asked to believe, and refuse
to trust a fact out of its sight. There is the danger of the day. There
is the lee-shore upon which the tendencies of the age are blowing our
bark: a gross and destructive materialism, which is the horrid and
treacherous development of a shallow realism.

In the midst of this splendid era there is a fast-increasing class who
are disposed to make the earth the absolute All,--to deny any outlet
from it,--to deny any capacity in man for another sphere,--to deny any
attribute in God which interests Him in man,--to shut out, therefore,
all faith, all that is mysterious, all that is spiritual, all that is
immortal, all that is Divine.

"There live, alas! of heaven-directed mien,
Of cultured soul, and sapient eye serene,
Who hail thee Man!--the pilgrim of a day,
Spouse of the worm, and brother of the clay,
Frail as the leaf in autumn's yellow bower,
Dust in the wind, or dew upon the flower,
A friendless slave, a child without a sire.
* * * * *
Are these the pompous tidings ye proclaim,
Lights of the world, and demigods of Fame?
Is this your triumph, this your proud applause,
Children of Truth, and champions of her cause?
For this hath Science searched on weary wing,
By shore and sea, each mute and living thing?
Launched with Iberia's pilot from the steep,
To worlds unknown, and isles beyond the deep?
Or round the cope her living chariot driven,
And wheeled in triumph through the signs of heaven?
O star-eyed Science, hast thou wandered there,
To waft us home the message of despair?"

Is shipwreck, after all, to be the end of the mysterious voyage? Yes,
unless there is something else beside materialism in the world. Unless
there is another spirit blowing _off_ that dreadful shore, unless the
chart opens a farther sea, unless the needle points to th