Constancy is perhaps an inaccurate word to employ of man’s intercourse with the Invisible.  Even in the most stedfast and unwavering this intercourse is characterized by

      tidal movements of devoutest awe
  Sinking anon to farthest ebb of doubt.

And in the world’s life there are ages of faith and ages of criticism.  Both assurance and questioning appear to be necessary.  Professor Royce asserts that “a study of history shows that if there is anything that human thought and cultivation have to be deeply thankful for, it is an occasional, but truly great and fearless age of doubt.”  And in individuals it is only by facing obstinate questionings that faith is freed from folly and attains reasonableness.

Nor can religious experience, however boldly it claims to know, fail to admit that its knowledge is but in part.  Our knowledge of God, like the knowledge we have of each other, is the insight born of familiarity; but no man entirely knows his brother.  And as for the Lord of heaven and earth, how small a whisper do we hear of Him!  Some minds are constitutionally ill-adapted for fellowship with Him because they lack what Keats calls “negative capability”—­“that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.  Coleridge, for instance, would let go a fine isolated verisimilitude, caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge.”  We have to trust God with His secrets, as well as try to penetrate them as far as our minds will carry us.  We have to accustom ourselves to look uncomplainingly at darkness, while we walk obediently in the light.  “They see not clearliest who see all things clear.”

But to many it seems all darkness, and the light is but a phantom of the credulous.  How do we know that we know, that the inference we draw from our experience is correct, that we are in touch with a living God who is to any extent what we fancy Him to be?  Our experience consists of emotions, impulses, aspirations, compunctions, resolves; we infer that we are in communion with Another—­the Christian God; but may not this explanation of our experience be mistaken?

Religious experience is self-evidencing to the religious.  God is as real to the believer as beauty to the lover of nature on a June morning, or to the artistic eye in the presence of a canvas by a great master.  Men are no more argued into faith than into an appreciation of lovely sights and sounds; they are immediately and overwhelmingly aware of the Invisible.

  The rest may reason, and welcome; ’tis we musicians know.