more grandly, the present phase of unbelief, which no doubt is needful,
and must appear some time in the world's history, would not have
appeared in our day. No doubt it has come when it must, and will vanish
when it must; but those who do believe are more to blame for it, I
think, than those who do not believe. The common kind of belief in God
is rationally untenable. Half to an insensate nature, half to a living
God, is a worship that cannot stand. God is all in all, or no God at
all. The man who goes to church every Sunday, and yet trembles before
chance, is a Christian only because Christ has claimed him; is not a
Christian as having believed in Him. I would not be hard. There are so
many degrees in faith! A man may be on the right track, may be learning
of Christ, and be very poor and weak. But I say there is no _standing_
room, no reality of reason, between absolute faith and absolute
unbelief. Either not a sparrow falls to the ground without Him, or there
is no God, and we are fatherless children. Those who attempt to live in
such a limbo as lies between the two, are only driven of the wind and
tossed.

Has my reader ever known the weariness of suffering, the clouding of the
inner sky, the haunting of spectral shapes, the misery of disordered
laws, when nature is wrong within him, and her music is out of tune and
harsh, when he is shot through with varied griefs and pains, and it
seems as there were no life more in the world, save of misery--"pain,
pain ever, for ever"? Then, surely, he has also known the turn of the
tide, when the pain begins to abate, when the sweet sleep falls upon
soul and body, when a faint hope doubtfully glimmers across the gloom!
Or has he known the sudden waking from sleep and from fever at once, the
consciousness that life is life, that life is the law of things, the
coolness and the gladness, when the garments of pain which, like that
fabled garment of Dejanira, enwrapped and ate into his being, have