“Has it never occurred to you, who, in denying all innate perceptions as well as ideas, have passed on to deductions from which poor Locke, humble Christian that he was, would have shrunk in dismay,--has it never occurred to you as a wonderful fact, that the easiest thing in the world to teach a child is that which seems to metaphysical schoolmen the abstrusest of all problems? Read all those philosophers wrangling about a First Cause, deciding on what are miracles, and then again deciding that such miracles cannot be; and when one has answered another, and left in the crucible of wisdom a caput mortuum of ignorance, then turn your eyes, and look at the infant praying to the invisible God at his mother’s knees. This idea, so miraculously abstract, of a Power the infant has never seen, that cannot be symbolled forth and explained to him by the most erudite sage,--a Power, nevertheless, that watches over him, that hears him, that sees him, that will carry him across the grave, that will enable him to live on forever,--this double mystery of a Divinity and of a Soul, the infant learns with the most facile readiness, at the first glimpse of his reasoning faculty. Before you can teach him a rule in addition, before you can venture to drill him into his horn-book, he leaps, with one intuitive spring of all his ideas, to the comprehension of the truths which are only incomprehensible to blundering sages! And you, as you stand before me, dare not say, ‘Let the child pray for me no more!’ But will the Creator accept the child’s prayer for the man who refuses prayer for himself? Take my advice, pray! And in this counsel I do not overstep my province. I speak not as a preacher, but as a physician. For health is a word that comprehends our whole organization, and a just equilibrium of all faculties and functions is the condition of health. As in your Lilian the equilibrium is deranged by the over-indulgence of a spiritual mysticism which withdraws from the nutriment of duty the essential pabulum of sober sense, so in you the resolute negation of disciplined spiritual communion between Thought and Divinity robs imagination of its noblest and safest vent. Thus, from opposite extremes, you and your Lilian meet in the same region of mist and cloud, losing sight of each other and of the true ends of life, as her eyes only gaze on the stars and yours only bend to the earth. Were I advising her, I should say: ‘Your Creator has placed the scene of your trial below, and not in the stars.’ Advising you, I say: ‘But in the trial below, man should recognize education for heaven.’ In a word, I would draw somewhat more downward her fancy, raise somewhat more upward your reason. Take my advice then,--Pray. Your mental system needs the support of prayer in order to preserve its balance. In the embarrassment and confusion of your senses, clearness of perception will come with habitual and tranquil confidence in Him who alike rules the universe and reads the heart.