The first requirement is shown to be unreasonable by the very terms in which it is made.  The intuitive insight of faith, the immediate conviction of the heart, cannot render, and must not try to render, any account of itself.  Proof is a process; but there is no process in this direct conviction of truth.  Its assertion is just the denial of process; it is a repudiation of all connections; in such a faith of feeling there are no cob-web lines relating fact to fact, which doubt could break.  Feeling is the immediate unity of the subject and object.  I am pained, because I cannot rid myself of an element which is already within me; I am lifted into the emotion of pleasure, or happiness, or bliss, by the consciousness that I am already at one with an object that fulfils my longings and satisfies my needs.  Hence, there seems to be ground for saying that, in this instance, the witness cannot lie; for it cannot go before the fact, as it is itself the effect of the fact.  If the emotion is pleasurable it is the consciousness of the unity within; if it is painful, of the disunity.  In feeling, I am absolutely with myself; and there seems, therefore, to be no need of attempting to justify, by means of reason, a faith in God which manifests itself in emotion.  The emotion itself is its own sufficient witness, a direct result of the intimate union of man with the object of devotion.  Nay, we may go further, and say that the demand is an unjust one, which betrays ignorance of the true nature of moral intuition and religious feeling.

I am not concerned to deny the truth that lies in the view here stated; and no advocate of the dignity of human reason, or of the worth of human knowledge, is called upon to deny it.  There is a sense in which the conviction of “faith” or “feeling” is more intimate and strong than any process of proof.  But this does not in any wise justify the contention of those who maintain that we can feel what we do not in any sense know, or that the heart can testify to that of which the intellect is absolutely silent.

  “So let us say—­not ‘Since we know, we love,’
  But rather, ‘Since we love, we know enough.’"[A]

[Footnote A:  A Pillar at Sebzevar.]

In these two lines there are combined the truth I would acknowledge, and the error I would confute.  Love is, in one way, sufficient knowledge; or, rather, it is the direct testimony of that completest knowledge, in which subject and object interpenetrate.  For, where love is, all foreign elements have been eliminated.  There is not “one and one with a shadowy third”; but the object is brought within the self as constituting part of its very life.  This is involved in all the great forms of human thought—­in science and art, no less than in morality and religion.  It is the truth that we love, and only that, which is altogether ours.  By means of love the poet is

  “Made one with Nature.  There is heard
  His voice in all her music, from the moan
  Of thunder to the song of night’s sweet bird “;