Truth can never be at variance with truth, science can never militate against faith:  we naturally speak of them both in their purity:  they respond to and they strengthen man’s most glorious thought:  immortality.  And yet you may say, “I was more peaceful, I was safer when, as a child, I closed my eyes on my mother’s breast and slept without thought or care, wrapping myself up simply in faith.”  This prescience, this compound of understanding in everything, this entering of the one link into the other from eternity to eternity, tears away from me a support—­my confidence in prayer; that which is, as it were, the wings wherewith to fly to my God!  If it be loosened, then I fall powerless in the dust, without consolation or hope.

I bend my energies, it is true, towards attaining the great and glorious light of knowledge, but it appears to me that therein is human arrogance:  it is, as one should say, “I will be as wise as God.”  “That you shall be!” said the serpent to our first parents when it would seduce them to eat of the tree of knowledge.  Through my understanding I must acknowledge the truth of what the astronomer teaches and proves.  I see the wonderful, eternal omniscience of God in the whole creation of the world—­in the great and in the small, where the one attaches itself to the other, is joined with the other, in an endless harmonious entireness; and I tremble in my greatest need and sorrow.  What can my prayer change, where everything is law, from eternity to eternity?

You tremble as you see the Almighty, who reveals Himself in all loving-kindness—­that Creator, according to man’s expression, whose understanding and heart are one—­you tremble when you know that he has elected you to immortality.

I know it in the faith, in the holy, eternal words of the Bible.  Knowledge lays itself like a stone over my grave, but my faith is that which breaks it.

Now, thus it is!  The smallest flower preaches from its green stalk, in the name of knowledge—­immortality.  Hear it! the beautiful also bears proofs of immortality, and with the conviction of faith and knowledge, the immortal will not tremble in his greatest need; the wings of prayer will not droop:  you will believe in the eternal laws of love, as you believe in the laws of sense.

When the child gathers flowers in the fields and brings us the whole handful, where one is erect and the other hangs the head, thrown as it were among one another, then it is that we see the beauty in every one by itself—­that harmony in colour and in form, which pleases our eye so well.  We arrange them instinctively, and every single beauty is blended together in one entire beauteous group.  We do not look at the flower, but on the whole bouquet.  The beauty of harmony is an instinct in us; it lies in our eyes and in our ears, those bridges between our soul and the creation around us—­in all our senses there is such a divine, such an entire and perfect stream in our whole being, a striving after the harmonious, as it shows itself in all created things, even in the pulsations of the air, made visible in Chladni’s figures.