abstrusest of all problems? Read all those philosophers wrangling about a
First Cause, deciding on what are miracles, and then again deciding that
such miracles cannot be; and when one has answered another, and left in
the crucible of wisdom a caput mortuum of ignorance, then turn your eyes,
and look at the infant praying to the invisible God at his mother's knees.
This idea, so miraculously abstract, of a Power the infant has never seen,
that cannot be symbolled forth and explained to him by the most erudite
sage,--a Power, nevertheless, that watches over him, that hears him, that
sees him, that will carry him across the grave, that will enable him to
live on forever,--this double mystery of a Divinity and of a Soul, the
infant learns with the most facile readiness, at the first glimpse of his
reasoning faculty. Before you can teach him a rule in addition, before
you can venture to drill him into his horn-book, he leaps, with one
intuitive spring of all his ideas, to the comprehension of the truths
which are only incomprehensible to blundering sages! And you, as you
stand before me, dare not say, 'Let the child pray for me no more!' But
will the Creator accept the child's prayer for the man who refuses prayer
for himself? Take my advice, pray! And in this counsel I do not overstep
my province. I speak not as a preacher, but as a physician. For health
is a word that comprehends our whole organization, and a just equilibrium
of all faculties and functions is the condition of health. As in your
Lilian the equilibrium is deranged by the over-indulgence of a spiritual
mysticism which withdraws from the nutriment of duty the essential pabulum
of sober sense, so in you the resolute negation of disciplined spiritual
communion between Thought and Divinity robs imagination of its noblest
and safest vent. Thus, from opposite extremes, you and your Lilian meet
in the same region of mist and cloud, losing sight of each other and of
the true ends of life, as her eyes only gaze on the stars and yours only
bend to the earth. Were I advising her, I should say: 'Your Creator has
placed the scene of your trial below, and not in the stars.' Advising