it is that every one who reached the hill-top would inevitably see the same scene.  Yet in the case of religion, the hill-top is crowded by people, whose good faith is equally incontestable, but whose descriptions of what lies beyond are at hopeless variance.  Moreover all alike confess that the impressions they derive are outside the possibility of scientific or intellectual tests, and that it is all a matter of inference depending upon a subjective consent in the mind of the discerner to accept what is incapable of proof.  The strength of the scientific position is that the scientific observer is in the presence of phenomena confirmed by innumerable investigations, and that, up to a certain point, the operation of a law has been ascertained, which no reasonable man has any excuse for doubting.  Whenever that law conflicts with religious assumptions, which in any case cannot be proved to be more than subjective assumptions, the unverifiable theory must go down before the verifiable.  Religion may assume, for instance, that life is an educative process; but that theory cannot be considered proved in the presence of the fact that many human beings close their eyes upon the world before they are capable of exercising any moral or intellectual choice whatever.

It may prove, upon investigation, that all religious theories and all creeds are nothing more than the desperate and pathetic attempts of humanity, conscious of an instinctive horror of suffering, and of an inalienable sense of their right to happiness, to provide a solution for the appalling fact that many human beings seem created only to suffer and to be unhappy.  The mystery is a very dark one; and philosophy is still not within reach of explaining how it is that a sense of justice should be implanted in man by the Power that appears so often to violate that conception of justice.

The fact is that the progress of science has created an immense demand for the quality of faith and hopefulness, by revealing so much that is pessimistic in the operation of natural law.  If we are to live with any measure of contentment or tranquillity, we must acquire a confidence that God has not, as science tends to indicate, made all men for nought.  We must, if we can, acquire some sort of hope that it is not in mere wantonness and indifference that He confronts us with the necessity for bearing the things that He has made us most to dread.  It may be easy enough for robust, vigorous, contented persons to believe that God means us well; but the only solution that is worth anything is a solution that shall give us courage, patience, and even joy, at times when everything about us seems to speak of cruelty and terror and injustice.  One of the things that has ministered comfort in large measure to souls so afflicted is the power of tracing a certain beauty and graciousness in the phenomena that surround us.  Who is there who in moments of bewildered sorrow has not read a hint of some vast