Here is an admission which must gravely affect not only our religious and philosophical relations with others, but even our practical and political life. Here is the fundamental difference between people of the same nation, or condition, or time, or even family. In other differences of opinion there may be found some common ground, but between faith and denial there is no common ground, because we are dealing with a question of the will and because the human will is free. The saying of Tertullian, that the human soul is naturally Christian, is in a literal sense quite untrue. Every man who reflects on his responsibilities recognizes that he is not naturally Christian. He is, at the most, only possibly Christian, as Tertullian perhaps meant to say. He is capable of becoming Christian through the experience of life. Atheism and Christianity are equally accessible to the nature of man. Faith in God, then, is a form of experience, not a form of proof. If experience were as unfruitful as proof, then faith in God would be nothing more than a nervous condition, and the answer of Festus--“Paul, thou art beside thyself!”--would be the just estimate of a faith like that of Paul. Each period of history has in fact produced many a Festus, sedulously guarding his reason and conscience against all that cannot be proved. Other faith, however, than that which proceeds from experience is not expected by God from any man; while to every man, in his own experience and in the witness of history, this faith is abundantly offered. There is, therefore, in the refusal of faith a confession, not merely of intellectual error, but of moral neglect; and many a man who has surrendered his faith would be slow to confess to others how well aware he is that the fault is his own. Here, then, is the first step toward the discovery of the meaning of life. It is an act of will, a moral venture, a listening to experience. No man can omit this initial step, and no man can teach another the lesson which lies in his own experience. The prophets of the Old Testament found an accurate expression for this act of will when they described it as a “turning,” and they went on to assure their people of the perfect inward peace and the sense of confidence which followed from this act. “Look unto me, and be ye saved,” says Isaiah; “Incline your ear, and come unto me: hear, and your soul shall live.” From that time to this, thousands of those who have thus changed the direction of their wills have entered into the same sense of peace; while no man who has thus given his will to God has ever felt himself permanently bewildered or forsaken.