is an argument for
the existence of the reality. In this case it is impossible to
conceive how the idea of communion with an unseen being ever entered
the human mind at all, unless it had been put there originally by
fact and experience. Man would never have even dreamed of a living
God, had not that living God been a reality, who did not leave the
creature to find his Creator, but stooped from heaven, at the very
beginning of our race, to find his creature.

And a reality you will surely find it--that living and practical
communication between your souls, and that Father in heaven who
created them. It will not be real, but morbid, even imaginary, just
in proportion as your souls are tainted with self-conceit, ambition,
self-will, malice, passion, or any wilful vice; especially with the
vice of bigotry, which settles beforehand for God what he shall
teach the soul, and in what manner he shall teach it, and turns a
deaf ear to his plainest lessons if they cannot be made to fit into
some favourite formula or theory. But it will be real, practical,
healthy, soul-saving, in the very deepest sense of that word, just
in proportion as your eye is single and your heart pure; just in
proportion as you hunger and thirst after righteousness, and wish
and try simply and humbly to do your duty in that station to which
God has called you, and to learn joyfully and trustingly anything
and everything which God may see fit to teach you. Then as your day
your strength shall be. Then will the Lord teach you, and inform
you with his eye, and guide you in the way wherein you should go.
Then will you obey that appeal of the Psalmist, 'Be ye not like to
horse and mule, which have no understanding, whose mouths must be
held in with bit and bridle, lest they fall upon thee. Great
plagues remain for the ungodly. But whoso putteth his trust in the
Lord, mercy embraceth him on every side.'

For understand this well, young men, and settle it in your hearts as
the first condition of human life, yea, of the life of every
rational created being, that a man is justified only by faith; and
not only a man, but angels, archangels, and all possible created
spirits, past, present, and to come. All stand, all are in their
right state, only as long as they are consciously dependent on God
the Father of spirits and his Son Jesus Christ the Lord, in whom
they live and move and have their being. The moment they attempt to
assert themselves, whether