statesman. If I had not the wonderful basis of religion, I should have turned my back to the whole court." Some one has said that the essence of pessimism is disbelief in God and man. Fear is a kind of atheism. Heine once said: "God was always the beginning and end of my thought. When I hear His existence questioned I feel a ghastly forlornness in a mad world." The inspiration of labor is faith in God, faith in man, faith in the moral order of the world, faith in progress. The religious man should have a sane view of life, should have convictions, and the courage of his convictions. He should believe that his work all counts toward some great purpose.
The impulse to reverence and prayer is an essential fact, as real as the inborn tendency to physical and mental action. Its development is necessary to the complete man. The religious nature obeys the great law of power through effort, and increases strength by use. He who by scientific analysis comes to doubt the value of his ethical feeling has not learned the essential truth of philosophy, namely, that a thing's origin must not be mistaken for its character.
Some tendencies of the best scientific thought of to-day, seen here and there, confirm this view of man's nature. Here are some fragments, expressed, not literally, but in substance: It is the business of science to analyze the entire content of human consciousness into atomic sensations, but there its work ends. The man of history, of freedom and responsibility, whose deeds we approve or disapprove, is the real man, a being of transcendent worth, aspiring toward perfect ideals; and the
