and agnostics.

To ethical idealists the great question is this: Does your belief make
for reverence; does it subdue your soul with a sense of the wonder and
mystery which are everywhere so conspicuous in nature; does it foster
the growth of your spiritual powers as opposed to the merely animal
instincts of your body; does it make you more moral, fill you with an
increasing enthusiasm for the good life for its own sake? Or, on the
other hand, does what you profess dishearten you, fill you with
melancholy and foreboding and a sense of the unprofitableness of
things, of the apparent aimlessness of all that is going on or being
done, of the fruitlessness of all human endeavour? Is the sigh of the
inspired sceptic, "Vanity of vanities, all is vanity," ever and anon
rising from your heart, and are you losing your faith in yourself and
humanity? That is the test of a faith--what it does for you, and you
could have no better one. The fact that he worships an "Unknown God"
means no shrinking of enthusiasm in him who believes that that
everlasting Power, which science no less than philosophy commands him
to believe, is identical with that very Power which is conspicuously
working in the universe for universal aims which also are good.
Outside a handful of men of no consequence amid the thundering assent
of the overwhelming masses of mankind, the course of things here is
upwards. Instinct suggests it, reason proclaims it, history confirms
it. But there are no two supreme powers, and therefore that Power I
reverence--

The God on whom I ever gaze,
The God I never once behold--

is also the everlasting "Power which makes for righteousness," that is,
for moral progress, the only progress ultimately worth caring about.

Men crave to see God. "Behold I show you a mystery." There are two
incarnations. There is the incarnation of God in flesh and blood, in
Chrishna in India, in Jesus in Palestine. Men have, men do worship
these men as gods. But there is a higher incarnation, a sublimer
theophany. There is that before which all incarnations, all saviours,
have ever bowed down in lowliest adoration; there is that whose
obedience they would not surrender if "the whole world and the glory
thereof" were given to them. There is that which is older than man and
his redeemers, higher than the stars, vast as the Immensities, ancient
as the Eternities themselves, and in this incarnation man may see God.
What is it? It is t