little the individual
may be able to separate the particulars which are assailed from the
universal with which they are accidentally connected, his whole nature
must rebel against the sacrifice which logical consistency seems in such
a case to demand from him. It is a painful experience when the first
break is made in the implicit unity of early faith, and it is painful
just in proportion to the depth of the spiritual consciousness which
that faith has produced in the individual. Unable to separate that which
he is obliged to doubt from that in which lies the principle of his
moral, and, even of his intellectual, life, he is "in a strait betwixt
two;" and no course seems to be open to him which does not involve the
surrender, either of his intellectual honesty, or of that higher
consciousness which alone "makes life worth living," Such a crisis is
commonly described as a division between the heart and the head, for in
it the articulate or conscious logic is on the side of disbelief, and
the resisting conviction generally takes the form of a feeling, an
impulse, an intuition, which the individual has for himself, but which
he is unable to communicate in the same force to another. And, as such
feelings and intuitions of the individual are necessarily subject to
continual variation of intensity and clearness, so the struggle between
doubt and faith may be long and difficult, the objections, which at one
time seem as nothing, at another time appearing to be almost
irresistible. Not seldom the result is a broken life, in which youth is
given to revolt, and the rest of existence to a faith which vainly
strives to be implicit. There is, indeed, no final and satisfactory
issue from such an endless internal debate and conflict, until the
"heart" has learned to speak the language of the "head,"--_i.e._, until
the permanent principles which underlay and gave strength to faith have
been brought into the light of distinct consciousness, and until it has
been discovered how to separate them from the accidents, with which at
first they were necessarily identified. The hard labour of
distinguishing, in the traditions of the past, between the germinative
principles, out of which the future must spring, and those external
forms and adjuncts, which every day is making more incredible, must be
undertaken by any one who would restore the broken unity of man's life.
We begin our existence under the shadow and influence of a faith which
is giv