of celestial truths, is also a language as superior to thought as thought is to instinct.  This language also can be learned.  The Believer answers with a single cry, a single gesture; Faith puts within his hand a flaming sword with which he pierces and illumines all.  The Seer attains to heaven and descends not.  But there are beings who believe and see, who know and will, who love and pray and wait.  Submissive, yet aspiring to the kingdom of light, they have neither the aloofness of the Believer nor the silence of the Seer; they listen and reply.  To them the doubt of the twilight ages is not a murderous weapon, but a divining rod; they accept the contest under every form; they train their tongues to every language; they are never angered, though they groan; the acrimony of the aggressor is not in them, but rather the softness and tenuity of light, which penetrates and warms and illumines.  To their eyes Doubt is neither an impiety, nor a blasphemy, nor a crime, but a transition through which men return upon their steps in the Darkness, or advance into the Light.  This being so, dear pastor, let us reason together.

“You do not believe in God?  Why?  God, to your thinking, is incomprehensible, inexplicable.  Agreed.  I will not reply that to comprehend God in His entirety would be to be God; nor will I tell you that you deny what seems to you inexplicable so as to give me the right to affirm that which to me is believable.  There is, for you, one evident fact, which lies within yourself.  In you, Matter has ended in intelligence; can you therefore think that human intelligence will end in darkness, doubt, and nothingness?  God may seem to you incomprehensible and inexplicable, but you must admit Him to be, in all things purely physical, a splendid and consistent workman.  Why should His craft stop short at man, His most finished creation?

“If that question is not convincing, at least it compels meditation.  Happily, although you deny God, you are obliged, in order to establish your doubts, to admit those double-bladed facts, which kill your arguments as much as your arguments kill God.  We have also admitted that Matter and Spirit are two creations which do not comprehend each other; that the spiritual world is formed of infinite relations to which the finite material world has given rise; that if no one on earth is able to identify himself by the power of his spirit with the great-whole of terrestrial creations, still less is he able to rise to the knowledge of the relations which the spirit perceives between these creations.

“We might end the argument here in one word, by denying you the faculty of comprehending God, just as you deny to the pebbles of the fiord the faculties of counting and of seeing each other.  How do you know that the stones themselves do not deny the existence of man, though man makes use of them to build his houses?  There is one fact that appals you,—­the Infinite; if you feel it within, why will you not