Such a prospect to the serious-minded and sensitive-spirited cannot but provoke the profoundest melancholy. There is, even for the most healthy-minded of us, sufficient ground for pessimism, bitterness, insecurity. Even if we personally--largely through the accidents of circumstance--happen to be successful, "our joy is a vulgar glee, not unlike the snicker of any rogue at his success." The utter futility and evanescence of earthly goods, beauties, and achievements is sensed at least sometimes by normally complacent souls. And so patent and ubiquitous are the evidences of decay, disease, and death at our disposal, that they may easily be erected into a thoroughgoing philosophy of life: Vanity of vanities, saith the preacher, vanity of vanities, all is vanity. What profit hath a man of all his labor which he taketh under the sun?... All things come alike to all: there is one event to the righteous and to the wicked; to the good and to the clean, and to the unclean; to him that sacrificeth and to him that sacrificeth not: as is the good so is the sinner; and he that sweareth as he that feareth an oath.... For the living know that they shall die; but the dead know not anything, neither have they any more a reward; for the memory of them is forgotten. Also their love and their hatred and their envy is now perished; neither have they any more a portion forever in anything that is done under the sun.[1] [Footnote 1: _Ecclesiastes_.] Religion offers solace to those perturbed and passionate souls, among others, to whom these futilities have become a rankling, continuous torment and depression. When life on earth appears fragmentary and disordered, not only nonsense but terrifying nonsense, full of hideous injustices, sickening uncertainties, and cruel destructions, men have not infrequently found a refuge in the divine. "Come unto me all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest." In the religious experience man finds life to be made clear, complete, and beautiful. What seems a contradictory fragment finds its precise niche in the divine scheme, what seems dark and cruel shines out in a setting of eternal beneficence and wisdom. The experience of the individual, even the happiest, is always partial, broken, and disordered. No ideal is ever completely realized, or if realized leaves some perfection to be desired. Men living in a natural existence imagine values and ideals which can never be realized there. In religion, if anywhere, men have found perfection, and ultimate sufficiency.