If there be a God, there is no other fact in the world of such awful or such blessed import to man. Religion is based on faith that there is a God. To tell the religious mind that there is no scientific proof of the existence of God is to tell it nothing new. Those were not the terms on which we took up our faith--that we should have scientific proof of everything before we did anything. On the contrary, religion begins when, and only when, a man begins "to walk humbly with his God," to know that he knows nothing except that his soul cleaves to God and humbly trusts in Him. We do not bargain so much belief, and no more, for so much proof: we give "ourselves, our souls and bodies." The gift is free. The soul shrinks from saying even that it has proof of God's existence; it only knows it hopes and longs for Him. "Faith is the assurance of things hoped for," and the strength of our assurance is as the strength of our hope. But scientific proof is not the thing hoped for: it is not what is desired when the soul is conscious of but one thing, that it thirsteth, like the hart after the water-brooks, for the living God. The humble confession of our illimitable ignorance is the foundation of our faith and will ever be its sure refuge, its inexpugnable stronghold. It is only when, being ignorant, we are tempted to deny our ignorance, that trouble begins. We drop the substance for the shadow when we believe not in God, but in some proof of God. To the man of science all this talk about faith appears mere folly, sheer unreason, a morbid wallowing in ignorance from pure love of ignorance; and there are others who, whilst admitting that proof is not what is wanted by some minds, yet are aware, from their own sad experience, that other minds yearn for it, and can know no peace without it. And if we ask what kind of proof it is that they require, the answer is plain: it is the same kind as science insists on. Then let us go to the man of science and wait at his door: he at any rate is not ignorant, and we, if ignorant, at least are willing to learn. That he should rather look down upon us is only what might be expected in a man who by sheer force of reason has discovered the sole source of truth and built up the whole fabric of science. Certainly, when he has taken us over his palace and shown us its marvels--the balances he uses to weigh the sun, the plates with which he photographs invisible stars, the cinematographic pictures of the earth's past history, his forecasts of the future of the solar system--we are not merely willing but eager to learn how it is all done. And when we come to know him, we find that in spite of the marvels, all of his own making, by which he is surrounded, he is not puffed up, as he might have been: indeed he is, he assures us, only an ordinary man. "Scientific investigation is not, as many people seem to suppose, some kind of modern black art."[25] It is simply plain, ordinary common sense, consistently applied; and, above all,