All that he said seemed to me unsupported by fact, unrelated to what we know. But when I found that my knowledge was merely an empty pretence, that it was the vanity of being able to predict and foretell that stood to me in the place of an absolute apprehension of fact--when all my intellectual possessions turned to nothingness, then I was forced into that simple quest for fact, which, when persisted in and lived in, opens out to the thoughts like a flower to the life-giving sun. It is indeed a far safer course, to believe that which appeals to us as noble, than simply to ask what is true; to take that which great minds have given, than to demand that our puny ones should be satisfied. But I suppose there is some good to some one in the scepticism and struggle of those who cannot follow in the safer course. The thoughts of the inquirer to whom I allude may roughly be stated thus:-- He saw in human life the working out of a great process, in the toil and strain of our human history he saw the becoming of man. There is a defect whereby we fall short of the true measure of our being, and that defect is made good in the course of history. It is owing to that defect that we perceive evil; and in the perception of evil and suffering lies our healing, for we shall be forced into that path at last, after trying every other, which is the true one. And this, the history of the redemption of man, is what he saw in all the scenes of life; each most trivial occurrence was great and significant in relation to this. And, further, he put forward a definite statement with regard to this defect, this lack of true being, for it lay, he said, in the self-centredness of our emotions, in the limitation of them to our bodily selves. He looked for a time when, driven from all thoughts of our own pain or pleasure, good or evil, we should say, in view of the miseries of our fellow-creatures, Let me be anyhow, use my body and my mind in any way, so that I serve. And this, it seems to me, is the true aspiration; for, just as a note of music flings itself into the march of the melody, and, losing itself in it, is used for it and lost as a separate being, so we should throw these lives of ours as freely into the service of--whom? Here comes the difficulty. Let it be granted that we should have no self-rights, limit our service in no way, still the question comes, What shall we serve? It is far happier to have some concrete object to which we are devoted, or to be bound up in the ceaseless round of active life, wherein each day presents so many necessities that we have no room for choice.