between two ignorances, as human life is itself only a traveling from grave to grave.  The highest reach of human science is the scientific recognition of human ignorance.’  Like you, Miss Beulah, I set out to discover some system where no mysteries existed; where I should only believe what I could clearly comprehend.  ‘Yes,’ said I proudly, ’I will believe nothing that I cannot understand.’  I wandered on until, like you, I stood in a wide waste, strewn with the wreck of beliefs.  My pride asserted that my reason was the only and sufficient guide, and whither did it lead me?  Into vagaries more inexplicable than aught I fled from in Revelation.  It was easier to believe that, ’in the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth,’ than that the glorious universe looked to chance as its sole architect, or that it was a huge lumbering machine of matter, grinding out laws.  I saw that I was the victim of a miserable delusion in supposing my finite faculties could successfully grapple with the mysteries of the universe.  I found that to receive the attempted solutions of philosophy required more faith than Revelation, and my proud soul humbled itself and rested in the Bible.  My philosophic experience had taught me that if mankind were to have any knowledge of their origin, their destiny, their God, it must be revealed by that God, for man could never discover aught for himself.  There are mysteries in the Bible which I cannot explain; but it bears incontrovertible marks of divine origin, and as such I receive it.  I can sooner believe the Mosaic revelation than the doctrine which tells you that you are part of God and capable of penetrating to absolute truth.  To quote the expressive language of an acute critic (whose well-known latitudinarianism and disbelief in the verbal inspiration of Scripture give peculiar weight to his opinion on this subject), ’when the advocates of this natural, spontaneous inspiration will come forth from their recesses of thought and deliver prophecies as clear as those of the Hebrew seer; when they shall mold the elements of nature to their will; when they shall speak with the sublime authority of Jesus of Nazareth; and with the same infinite ease, rising beyond all the influence of time, place, and circumstances, explain the past and unfold the future; when they die for the truth they utter, and rise again as witnesses to its divinity; then we may begin to place them on the elevation which they so thoughtlessly claim.  But until they either prove these facts to be delusions, or give their parallel in themselves, the world may well laugh at their ambition and trample their spurious inspiration beneath its feet.’  There is an infinite, eternal, and loving God; I am a finite creature, unable to comprehend him, and knowing him only through his own revelation.  This very revelation is insufficient for our aspiring souls, I grant; but it declares emphatically that here ’we see through a glass darkly.’  Better this than the starless night in which you grope, without a promise of the dawn of eternity, where all mystery shall be explained.  Are you not weary of fruitless, mocking speculation?” He looked at her anxiously.