whether temptations assail, whether doubts press in, in all these dark and troublous night-times of the soul, that unshaken belief in God as the only good, and in good as the only life, sustains our steps. Faith alone, faith which has not borrowed its light from love, cannot do this. But a faith that is the reflection of genuine love once ours, cannot by any possibility fail us.
So, when this belief in God which is born of love has power to sustain us amid our night-times of life, the lesser light, the moon of faith, begins to shine upon us with its silvery radiance. Set up within the spiritual region of the mind, it sheds light upon our darkness, illumines our farthest pathways, saves us from snares and pitfalls, and carries us safely on to another state of newly awakened day.
Then those beautiful knowledges of eternal things, in their vast variety, thoughts of God the Lord, conceptions of a true life, ideas of mercy, love and truth, far off glimmerings of a heaven beyond—all these shine down, help our faith to illuminate our mental world, maintain our light when faith itself is dim, but silently disappear to conscious view, when love irradiates the mind with so large a light and warmth, as to point the way to all things without manifest intellectual aid. Radiant stars on the mind's clear sky are they, whose lights reveal celes-