tic of the most comprehensive genius.
It has been a topic on which it has been fond of mournfully dilating.
It is thus with Socrates, with Plato, with Bacon (even amidst all his
magnificent aspirations and bold predictions), with Newton, with Pascal,
and especially with Butler, in whom, if in any, the sentiment is carried
to excess. We need not say that it is seldom found in the writings of
those modern speculators who rush, in the hardihood of their adventurous
logic, on a solution of the problems of the Absolute and the Infinite,
and resolve in delightfully brief demonstrations the mightiest problems
of the universe--those great enigmas, from which true philosophy
shrinks, not because it has never ventured to think of them, but because
it has thought of them enough to know that it is in vain to attempt
their solution. To know the limits of human philosophy is the 'better
part' of all philosophy; and though the conviction of our ignorance is
humiliating, it is, like every true conviction, salutary. Amidst
this night of the soul, bright stars--far distant fountains of
illumination--are wont to steal out, which shine not while the imagined
Sun of reason is above the horizon! and it is in that night, as in the
darkness of outward nature, that we gain our only true ideas of the
illimitable dimensions of the universe, and of our true position in it.

Meanwhile we conclude that God has created 'two great lights,'--the
greater light to rule man's busy day--and that is Reason, and the lesser
to rule his contemplative night--and that is Faith.

But faith itself shines only so long as she reflects some faint
Illumination from the brighter orb.

End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Reason and Faith; Their Claims and
Conflicts, by Henry Rogers

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