huge proportions, have accumulated such immense and complicated resources, have gained such supreme confidence in their own stability, have pushed forward their successes with such startling power and rapidity, that we have lost count of their primal assumption. In amazement at their stupendous range, we are over-awed; we dare not challenge them with their hypothetical origin, or remind them that their entire and wonderful structure is but an empty and hollow dream, unless they are prepared to place their uttermost trust in an unverified act of faith. Given that trust, which relies on the reality of the bond which holds between our inner faculties and the outer world, then all this marvellous vision is rooted on a rock, has validity and substance. Withdraw that spiritual trust in our sonship, and all this fairy-world, won for us by science and experience, These cloud-capped towers, these gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, And, like an unsubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind. Our secular and scientific life is an immense experiment in faith,--an experiment which verifies itself by success, but which justifies itself only if it remembers to attribute all its success to the reality of that hidden relationship to God, which is the key to all its capacities, the justification of all its confidence, and the security of all its advance. Such a remembrance is not easy for it: for the exercise of the capacities is instinctive and spontaneous, and it requires an effort of reflection to question the validity of such exercise. And such an effort seems tiresome and impertinent in the heat of successful progress, in the thick of crowding conquests. The practical man is apt to give an irritated stamp on the ground, which to him feels so solid, and to deem this a sufficient answer to the importunate inquiry how he knows that he has any substantial world to know and to handle. For faith lies _behind_ our secular life, secreted within it: and the secular life, therefore, can go on as if no faith was wanted; it need not trouble its head with perplexing questions, whether its base be verifiable by the same standards and measures as its superstructure. Its own practical activity is complete and free, whether it discover its hidden principle or not: just as Mr. Jourdain's conversation was complete and free, long before he discovered that he was talking prose. We have to stand outside our secular life and reflect on it, to disclose its true spring. The appeal to faith here is indirect.