may become, the means of help—­self-help even—­and the law of it must be from that same power, whose efficient working he has recognized with a thankful heart.  Where else shall he look except to that experience of exaltation during whose continuance he plucked a natural trust for the future, a reasonable belief in Providence, and a humble readiness to accept the partial ills of life?  In life’s valleys, then, as on its summits, in the darkness as in the light, he may retain that once confided trust; not that he looks for miracle, or any specific and particularizing care, it may be, but that in the normal course of things he believes in the natural alliance of that arm of infinite power with himself.  In depression, in trouble, in struggle, such as all life exhibits, he will be no more solitary than in his hours of blessing.  Thus, through helplessness also, he establishes a direct relation with God, which is also a reality of experience, as vital in the cry for aid as in the offering of thanks.  The gratitude of the soul may be likened to that morning prayer of the race which was little more than praise with uplifted hands; the helplessness of man is rather the evening prayer of the Christian age, which with bowed head implores the grace of God to shield him through the night.  These two, in all times, among all races, under ten thousand divinities, have been the voices of the heart.

“There is a third mood of direct experience by which one approaches the religious life.  Surely no man in our civilization can grow far in years without finding out that, in the effort to live a life obeying his desires and worthy of his hopes, his will is made one with Christ’s commands; and he knows that the promises of Christ, so far as they relate to the life that now is, are fulfilled in himself day by day; he can escape neither the ideal that Christ was, nor the wisdom of Christ in respect to the working of that ideal on others and within himself.  He perceives the evil of the world, and desires to share in its redemption; its sufferings, and would remove them; its injustice, and would abolish it.  He is, by the mere force of his own heart in view of mankind, a humanitarian.  But he is more than this in such a life.  If he be sincere, he has not lived long before he knows in himself such default of duty that he recognizes it as the soul’s betrayal; its times and occasions, its degrees of responsibility, its character whether of mere frailty or of an evil will, its greater or less offence, are indifferent matters; for, as it is the man of perfect honour who feels a stain as a wound, and a shadow as a stain, so poignancy of repentance is keenest in the purest souls.  It is death that is dull, it is life that is quick.  It may well be, in the world’s history in our time, that the suffering caused in the good by slight defections from virtue far overbalances the general remorse felt for definite and habitual crime.  Thus none—­those least who are most hearts of conscience—­escapes this emotion,