Here lie the difficulties.  The battle is to be fought here—­here at the very threshold—­at the entrance to the spiritual world.  Are we moral and spiritual beings, or are we not?  That is the decisive question, which we must say our Yes or No to.  If, with our eyes open, and with all our hearts, it be given us to say Yes—­to say Yes without fear, and firmly, and in the face of everything—­then there will be little more to fear.  We shall have fought the good fight, we shall have kept the faith; and whatever we lack more, will without doubt be added to us.  From this belief in ourselves we shall pass to the belief in God, as its only rational basis and its only emotional completion; and, perhaps, from a belief in God, to a recognition of His audible voice amongst us.  But at any rate, whatever after-difficulties beset us, they will not be new difficulties; only those we had braved at first, showing themselves more clearly.

But that first decision—­how shall we make it?  Who or what shall help us, or give us counsel?  There is no evidence that can do so in the sensible world around us.  The universe, as positive thought approaches it, is blind and dumb about it.  Science and history are sullen, and blind, and dumb.  They await upon our decision before they will utter a single word to us:  and that decision, if we have a will at all, it lies with our own will—­with our will alone, to make.  It may, indeed, be said that the will has to create itself by an initial exercise of itself, in an assent to its own existence.  If it can do this, one set of obstacles is surmounted; but others yet confront us.  The world into which the moral will has borne itself—­not a material world, but a spiritual—­a world which the will’s existence alone makes possible, this world is not silent, like the other, but it is torn and divided against itself, and is resonant with unending contradictions.  Its first aspect is that of a place of torture, a hell of the intellect, in which reason is to be racked for ever by a tribe of sphinx-like monsters, themselves despairing.  Good and evil inhabit there, confronting each other, for ever unreconciled:  there is omnipotent power baffled, and omnipotent mercy unexercised.  Is the will strong enough to hold on through this baffling and monstrous world, and not to shrink back and bid the vision vanish?  Can we still resolve to say, ’I believe, although it is impossible’?  Is the will to assert our own moral nature—­our own birthright in eternity, strong enough to bear us on?

The trial is a hard one, and whilst we doubt and hesitate under it the universal silence of the vast physical world itself disheartens us.  Who are we, in the midst of this unheeding universe, that we can claim for ourselves so supreme a heritage; that we can assert for ourselves other laws than those which seem to be all-pervading, and that we can dream of breaking through them into a something else beyond?