observers that prayer and faith and religious convictions have been
among the mightiest forces at work in the world, and any system of
reasoning that does not take these facts into consideration is
neither philosophical nor scientific.

To illustrate what is meant by saying that we must follow experience
rather than conceivability, let us suppose that you are suffering
from a malignant disease and you hear of a medicine that has cured
this disease whenever it has been tried, and you know of nothing else
that will cure it. Would it not be foolish for you to refuse to use
the medicine because you cannot conceive how it produces the cure? It
might be discovered later that it was not the medicine, but your
belief in its curative qualities, that produced the result. But this
would not affect your common-sense duty in the matter. If certain
desirable results follow the doing of a certain thing, we are bound
to do that thing until we know how to get the good results without
doing it.

This reveals the folly and inhumanity of the conduct of some infidels
towards religious people. When I was minister of a church in Ohio, I
was visited by a noted infidel. After he went on in a tirade against
preachers and Christians, I asked him if he was not an unhappy man.
At first he denied it; but I called his attention to some of his
utterances, and he soon admitted that he was a very unhappy man. But
he said he was unhappy because he knew too much, and claimed that
Christians were so happy because they were ignorant and deluded. He
claimed to be a great lover of humanity, and although, according to
his profession, he had no God or conscience or judgment to require it
of him, he spent his time in spreading the knowledge and wisdom which
made people unhappy by destroying that which he admitted gave people