ose, I love, I know that I am dependent upon a
Being higher than myself. I see that I am related to other personalities
with rights as sacred as my own, and, therefore, that I must choose,
think, love so as to be acceptable to the One to whom I am responsible,
and harmonious with those by whom I am surrounded.

The soul's awakening is primarily a recognition and an appreciation of
its responsibility. It may think, choose, love, without realizing
responsibility, and, therefore, live as if it were the only being in the
universe; but the moment it recognizes responsibility it also discerns a
higher Person, and other persons, since responsibility to no one, and
for nothing, is inconceivable.

The soul's awakening, therefore, carries with it the idea of obligation,
and that includes the recognition of God, of duty, of right and wrong,
in short, of a moral ideal. I do not mean to insist that every one
appreciates all that is implied in consciousness of responsibility.
There are degrees of alertness, and some men are wide awake and others
half asleep.

However it may have come to its self-realization, that is a solemn and
sublime moment when a human soul understands, ever so dimly, that it is
facing in the unseen Being one on whom it knows itself to be dependent;
and when it discerns the hitherto invisible lines which bind it to other
personalities, in all space and time. At that moment life really begins.
Henceforward, by various ways, over undreamed-of obstacles, assisted by
invisible hands, hindered by unseen forces, in spite of foes within and
enemies without, the course of that soul must ever be toward its true
home and goal, in the bosom of God.

The difficulties in the way of such a faith for the thoughtful and
sensitive are many and serious. Not all blossoms come to fruitage; not
all human beings are fit to live; processes of degeneration seem to be
at work in nature, in society, and in the individual life.

Apparently true and time-honored interpretations of Scripture are quoted
against the faith that in some way, and by some kind of discipline, the
souls of men will forever approach God; while the belief of the church,
so far as it has found expression in the creeds is urged in opposition.
But when I see how timidly the creeds of the church have been held by
many in all ages, how large a number of the most spiritual and morally
earnest have questioned them at this point, and how often they have been
rejected in