There is a law operative among all creatures, that every instinct of the being has something answering to it from without, toward which it turns in its periods of need and helplessness. The breast of the mother answers to the instinctive action of the hungry infant; the strength of parents to the feeble clinging of the child; the atmosphere to the outstretched moving wing of the bird; the water to the waving fin of the newly hatched fish; and these instincts would not exist except for the answering reality outside and about them, which calls them into activity. So it must ever be, as to religious belief in the human race. Man realizes at times, and will always continue to do so, that he is a very helpless being in the midst of a stupendous system, a relentless on-going of nature, silent as the tomb and terrible as fate, and from which there come to him no voices of assurance and no gleams of hope. It cannot otherwise be, than that he should feel, even in the fulness of his strength and the highest realization of his powers, that he stands as on a grain of sand only; that the longest ranges of his vision are soon enveloped in darkness; that his knowledge is as ignorance when compared with that wisdom which is manifested by the greatness of worlds which look down upon him from the depths of space. He must always realize how feeble are his highest conceptions or imaginations, when he tries to push them out among the systems of worlds which are so much larger and grander than his own, or when he undertakes to change or regulate a movement or operation of nature. This being so, it must be that man will, in the future as in the past, look toward and seek help from some Power above and beyond himself. The instinct is and must be as true to the reality as is that of the hungry child when it turns to its mother, or that of the fish which leads it to move when in the water; and, as the water answers to the instinct of the fish, as the breast of the mother to the calling of the child, and the atmosphere to the wing of the bird, so, too, must there exist a Being responsive to that instinct which leads man to pray and trust.