And yet it may be that faith will succeed and conquer sight—­that the preciousness of the treasure we cling to will nerve us with enough strength to retain it.  It may be that man, having seen the way that, unaided, he is forced to go, will change his attitude; that, finding only weakness in pride, he will seek for strength in humility, and will again learn to say, ‘I believe, although I never can comprehend.’  Once let him say this, his path will again grow clearer for him.  Through confusion, and doubt, and darkness, the brightness of God’s countenance will again be visible; and by-and-by again he may hear the Word calling him.  From his first assent to his own moral nature he must rise to a theism, and he may rise to the recognition of a Church—­to a visible embodiment of that moral nature of his, as directed and joined to its one aim and end—­to its delight, and its desire, and its completion.  Then he will see all that is high and holy taking a distinct and helping form for him.  Grace and mercy will come to him through set and certain channels.  His nature will be redeemed visibly from its weakness and from its littleness—­redeemed, not in dreams or in fancy, but in fact.  God Himself will be his brother and his father; he will be near akin to the Power that is always, and is everywhere.  His love of virtue will be no longer a mere taste of his own:  it will be the discernment and taking to himself of the eternal strength and of the eternal treasure; and, whatever he most reveres in mother, or wife, or sister—­this he will know is holy, everywhere and for ever, and is exalted high over all things in one of like nature with theirs, the Mother of grace, the Parent of sweet clemency, who will protect him from the enemy, and save him in the hour of death.

Such is the conception of himself, and of his place in existence, that, always implicit in man, man has at last developed.  He has at last conceived his race—­the faithful of it—­as the bride of God.  Is this majestic conception a true one, or is it a dream only, with no abiding substance?  Is it merely a misty vision rising up like an exhalation from the earth, or does a something more come down to it out of heaven, and strike into it substance and reality?  This figure of human dreams has grown and grown in stature:  does anything divine descend to it, and so much as touch its lips or its lifted hands?  If so, it is but the work of a moment.  The contact is complete.  Life, and truth, and force, like an electric current, pass into the whole frame.  It lives, it moves, it breathes:  it has a body and a being:  the divine and the eternal is indeed dwelling amongst us.  And thus, though mature knowledge may seem, as it still widens, to deepen the night around us; though the universe yawn wider on all sides of us, in vaster depths, in more unfathomable, soulless gulfs; though the roar of the loom of time grow more audible and more deafening in our ears—­yet through the night and through the darkness the divine light of our lives will only burn the clearer:  and this speck of a world as it moves through the blank immensity will bear the light of all the worlds upon its bosom.