If, then, we are at times tempted to fancy that all this undemonstrable experience is unreal, or metaphysical, or purposeless, or imaginary, it is best to deal with such returning scepticism much as we deal with the selfish or mean thoughts which we are trying to outgrow. Let all these hindrances to the higher life be quietly but firmly repelled. The better world we enter is indeed entered by faith and not by sight; but this faith grows more confident and more supporting, until it is like an inward faculty of sight itself. To substitute for this a world of the outward senses is to find no meaning in life which can convey confidence and peace. It is but to embitter every noble and thoughtful nature with restless doubts from which there is no escape. Such was religion as it disclosed itself to the early Hebrews. Soon, indeed, that religion was overgrown by the formalism which converted its practical teaching into mere prohibitions or mere mechanism; but behind these abuses of later history lay the primitive simplicity of spiritual liberty and life. Such also was the historical beginning of the Christian religion. The mission of Christ, like that of each genuine reformer, was to recall men to their original consciousness of God; and it is perhaps the greatest tragedy of history, while at the same time the best proof of the free will of man, that the Hebrew people, to whom Christ announced that he was expressly sent, could not, as a whole, bring themselves to obey his call. They were held in bondage by their accumulated formalism, as many a man has been ever since. They could not rise to the thought of a worship which was in spirit and in truth. Had they, with their extraordinary gifts, been able to hear Christ’s message, they would have become the dominant nation of the world. And what is to be said of those Gentile peoples who listened more willingly to the message of Christ, those “wild olive trees,” as St. Paul calls them, which were grafted on the “broken branches”? They also have had the same history. They also, in their own way, have become enslaved by the same formalism; and they also must regain their liberty through the return of individual souls to a personal experience of the method of Christ.