Philosophers have explored the field with telescopes of a longer range than the eyes of a thousand saints, and have recognised nothing save the silent and distant horizon. Priests have denounced them for not perceiving what was invisible. Sectaries have clamored, and the most ignorant have howled--as the most ignorant always do--that there is something there, because they want to see it. All the while the white mystery is still unpenetrated in this life. * See Secularism a Religion which Gives Heaven no Trouble. But a future being undisclosed is no proof that there is no future. Those who reason through their desires will believe there is; those who reason through their understanding may yet hope that there is. In the meantime, all stand before the portals of the untrodden world in equal unknowingness. If faith can be piety, work is more so. To bring new beauty out of common life--is not that piety? To change blank stupidity into intelligent admiration of any work of nature--is not that piety? If our towns and streets be made to give gladness and cheerfulness to all who live or walk therein--is not that piety? If the prayer of innocence ascend to heaven through a pure atmosphere, instead of through the noisome and polluted air of uncleanness common in the purlieus of towns and of churches, and even cathedrals--is not that piety? Can we, in these days, conceive of religious persons being ignorant and dirty? Yet they abound. If, therefore, we send to heaven clean, intelligent, bright-minded saints--is not that piety? It is no bad religion--as religions go--to believe in the good God of knowledge and cleanliness and cheerfulness and beauty, and offer at his altar the daily sacrifice of intelligent sincerity and material service. We leave to others their own way of faith and worship. We ask only leave to take our own. Carlyle has told us that only two men are to be honored, and no third--the mechanic and the thinker: he who works with honest hand, making the world habitable; and he who works with his brain, making thought artistic and true. "All the rest," he adds with noble scorn, "are chaff, which the wind may blow whither it list-eth." The certainty of heaven is for the useful alone. Mere belief is the easiest, the poorest, the shabbiest device by which conscientious men ever attempted to scale the walls of Paradise. CHAPTER XVII. THE ETHICAL METHOD OF CONTROVERSY "It was one of the secrets of my craft in the old days, when I wanted to weld iron or work steel to a fine purpose, to begin gently. If I began, as all learners do, to strike my heaviest blows at the start, the iron would crumble instead of welding, or the steel would suffer under my hammer, so that when it came to be tempered it would 'fly,' as we used to say, and rob the thing I had made of its finest quality." --Robert Coliyer, D. D.