has been enforced upon it as an essential article of religious faith which it could never reconcile with itself, it begins to question whether there is any such principle as religious faith, and what its value to the soul when it involves such absurdities. Its proper function is to search out and eradicate those errors of opinion that conflict with the spiritual perceptions, by which we recognize certain truths independent of the intellect, but harmonizing with it, being the highest development of the innate consciousness we call faith, which is the natural endowment of every living soul. It is manifest in the child when he runs to his mother for protection before he has learned to lisp her name; in man, in the confidence with which he looks forward to the fulfilment of every relation of the material universe towards him as a dependent on its bounty. In its highest manifestation forming the basis of the religious sentiments, it is no more to be confounded with belief than theology with religion. One pertains to the intellect and is as diversified as the human mind, the other is the divine illumination By which alone we ascend to a knowledge of things divine, and feel the glow of the ineffable love that gilds life's saddest hours with a foretaste of the blessedness of immortality. Belief is the mental result of the effort to reduce it to a system, and varies with the progressive stages of civilization. It can no more change its essential nature than the different modes of training a child can affect the nature of parental love.
"Man's extremity is God's opportunity."
