Any science of human history that does not acknowledge man’s relation to a personal God is fatally incomplete; for it has missed the goal of man’s development and the chief means of his farther advance.  And a religion which does not emphasize this is worse than a broken reed.  It is a mirage of the desert, toward which thirsty souls run only to die unsatisfied.

Man can never overcome in this battle with the allurements of material prosperity and with the pride and selfishness of intellect, except as he is interpenetrated and permeated with God, any more than we can move or think, unless our blood is charged with the oxygen of the air.  It is not enough that man have God in his intellectual creed; he must have him in his heart and will, in every fibre of his personality, in every thought and action of life.  Otherwise his defeat and ruin are sure.

Three fatal heresies are abroad to-day:  1.  Man’s chief end is avoidance of pain and discomfort, in one word, happiness; and God is somehow bound to surfeit man with this.  And this is the chief end of a mollusk. 2.  Man’s chief end is material prosperity and social position. 3.  Man’s chief end is intellect, knowledge.  Each one of these three ends, while good in a subordinate place, will surely ruin man if made his chief end.  For they leave out of account conformity to environment.  “Man’s chief end is to glorify God and enjoy him for ever.”  And just as the plant glorifies the sun by turning to, and being permeated and vivified and built up by, the warmth and light of its rays, similarly man must glorify God.  This is the religion of conformity to environment:  man working out his salvation because God works in him.  Thus, and thus only, shall man overcome the allurements of these lower endowments and receive the rewards of “him that overcometh.”

Thus prosperity and adversity, success and failure, continually test a man.  If he can rise superior to these, can subjugate them and make them subserve his moral progress, he survives; if he is mastered by them, he perishes.  Through these does natural selection mainly work to find and train great souls.  They are the threads of the sieve of destiny.

In this struggle man must fight against overwhelming odds, and the cost of victory is dear.  He must be prepared, like Socrates, to “bid farewell to those things which most men count honors, and look onward to the truth.”  He appears to the world at large, often to himself, eminently unpractical.  The majority against his view and vote will usually be overwhelming.  Truth is a stern goddess, and she will often bid him draw sword and stand against his nearest and dearest friends.  The issue will often appear to him exceeding doubtful.  The grander the truth for which he is fighting, the greater the need of its defence and enforcement, the greater the probability that he will never live to see its triumph.  The hero must be a man of gigantic faith.  But all his ancestors have had to make a similar choice and to fight a similar battle.  The upward path was intended to be exceedingly hard.  This is a law of biology.