The heart is concerned in our believing as well as the naked intellect. It is the harmony of reason, feeling, and purpose in apprehending the objects or subject-matter of religious faith that makes up religious believing, and by it those objects become to us realities of knowledge to which our being conforms. There is nothing forced, nothing arbitrary, nothing imaginary, nothing superstitious involved, but all is natural, inwardly confirmed, and made morally certain in the same way and through the same medium by which our knowledge in general is conditioned.

Take, for example, the great central truth of all religion, the divine existence. Let it be put before the understanding that there is a God. What, then, is the process by which we come to realize it as a certitude of knowledge? First, reason looks at it and perceives and decides upon the pre-eminent fittingness of the thing; it finds its demands ade

keeping pace with the will, stops to look on the appearance that pleases it, and, judging by what it sees, insensibly regulates its belief by the inclination of the will."-Pascal's Thoughts on Religion, ch.

XXV.

"The perception of truth is a moral act—an act of the will, and not chiefly of the understanding. For even after every misapprehension and doubt has been cleared up, it is the will which finally decides upon its reception or rejection. What we need, then, is willingness to know the truth."-Luthardt's Fundamental Truths, pp. 35, 36.

quately met as far as it has any right to demand in such a case; it has nothing to interpose to render the acceptance of the proposition impossible, but much to support it as most probable. Along with this comes an inward feeling or spontaneous consciousness realizing that the thing is and must needs be, at the same time responding to it as exactly what it has been feeling after to fill up a vacancy which nothing else can fill. With these presentations the will also moves to take and abide by what is thus evidenced. And by these natural operations, by which any moral truth becomes reality to us, we have it as an article of knowledge that God is; which is made all the more certain from the experience of resting in and communion with Him.

And so it is with regard to all moral and religious truths. The mind contemplates them, the heart responds to them, and the will is pleased to accept and take them; and so they are evidenced and substantiated to us the same as our knowledge that we are, that we think, that we wake, or that we dream.

The great trouble with those who are skeptical touching religion is not so much that the truth is inadequately evidenced, but that there is a perverseness of heart and will which does not like to retain God in the thoughts, but prefers and chooses not to believe; for in all other things they experi

ence no trouble whatever in daily living, acting, and thinking in this very element and essence of all religion. Surely, if faith will do for life, action, and thought in other departments, it is just as legitimate and competent for the department of religion; and there is something morally wrong where the contrary is assumed. Nay, the veriest despisers of religion are continually living a good part of what they object to and despise. They oppose religion, and yet the main element of it is in them, part of their practical life, in all their knowledge and thinking, and inseparable from their being.

But religion is more than a mere naked and inoperative faith. It embraces also a life and activity toward the God whom it accepts. There must come with real faith a reverent fear and love of God and hope in Him, in which faith evidences its vitality. And this fear and love and hope, constituting what we may call the life of religion, must needs manifest and embody itself in worship, the opening of the heart to God, adoration, praise, coming to Him, intercourse and communion with Him, effort to please and be on terms with Him, and earnest desire to enjoy his favor and help; all of which may be summed up and expressed in the one word prayer. No one questions the statement that "all religion is faith," and so it will be equally admitted that the life

of all religion is prayer. A religion without prayer is as impossible as a religion without faith.

But the worth of prayer is again one of the particular things attacked by our modern skeptical thinkers. Of course, as they deny the existence of a personal God and regard all religious faith as mere superstition, it is logical from that point of view for them to make light of all acts of worship and to sneer at prayer. But as they have against them the best wisdom and virtue of universal man in the one case, so they are altogether without just reason in this. Nay, having never honestly and faithfully tried it themselves, on their own principles they are in right estopped from having any say or judgment in the matter. Let them as fully and as assiduously test it by devout personal experiment as they have labored in the fields of science through which they have come to the persuasion that there is no God, and we have the assurance of One who has never been convicted of mistake or a lie that they will come out effectually cured of their skeptical ridicule.

But even as it is, these revilers of prayer must either be very malignant and misanthropic, or they live every day in the very spirit of what they so much depreciate. Is it true that they never feel wants which they desire to have satisfied? Is it

true that there never rises in their souls one good, kindly, and earnest wish for any being on earth? Is it true that they are conscious of no blessing or benediction which they would fain have conferred upon their friends, upon society, upon the sorrowing and wretched, upon the ignorant, destitute, and forlorn? Is it true that they have no homes, no domestic circles, which they love enough to desire to make happy? Is it true that kindred and country and the welfare of the race are things of so much indifference to their hearts as never to command from them a single thought or sigh or motion of kindly solicitude, or any welling interest to have them prosper and be at peace and share exemption from ills they know of? If so, then they have ceased to be men, and the best we can do for them is to provide for them asylums and attendants where they may end their earthly days without danger to good citizens. But if not so-as we happily have abundant proofs-then do they in large measure live and cherish the very thing at which they sneer. There is also a very vital connection between work and prayer. If we are in real earnest in working for a thing, we are inwardly praying for it. Whatever takes hold upon the soul, awakens desire, and stimulates aspiration and effort, thus awakens the spirit of prayer. Whenever our souls go out