alone can understand and justify, though the faithfulness of the eternal and supreme Father ensures that the anticipation shall receive its full verification. If this be the relation of faith to reason, we see the explanation of what seems, at first sight, to the philosopher, to be the most irritating and hypocritical characteristic of faith. It is always shifting its intellectual defences. It adopts this or that fashion of philosophical apology; and then, when this is shattered by some novel scientific generalisation, faith, probably after a passionate struggle to retain the old position, suddenly and gaily abandons it, and takes up with the new formula, just as if nothing had happened: it discovers that the new formula is admirably adapted for its purposes, and is, in fact, just what it always meant, only it has unfortunately omitted to mention it. So it goes on, again and again; and no wonder that the philosophers growl at those humbugs, the clergy! But they are criticising faith as if it were a theory, as if knowledge were its province, while, in truth, the seat of faith lies back behind the region of knowledge. Its radical acts and motives are independent of any particular condition of thought or science: they are deeper recessed; they exist in their own right, and under their own conditions. True, they may not be able to express themselves, to get their energies forward, to set themselves free, to manifest themselves, except through the mediation of knowledge,--through the instruments and channels which the science of the day provides them. But this does not confuse their inherent and distinct character. They never identify themselves with the tools they use. They sit quite loose to the particular state of thought, the formula, the terms, through which they make their way out into action. And, moreover, since the acts of faith are more radical than those of reason, and since they belong to the entire man acting in his integrity, they therefore of necessity anticipate, in their degree, all that the man, by slow development, by the patient industry of reasoning, will laboriously disclose. Lying deeper than all knowledge, they hold in them the condition under which all knowledge will be arrived at. They constitute the activity which ought to be at the background of all our reasoning. No particular or partial state of knowledge can exhaust their significance. Each step knowledge makes does but illustrate, in some new fashion, the relation of all knowledge to faith--does but elucidate the characteristics of that primal sonship. In each fresh discovery or generalisation, faith finds a new instrument for expressing its old convictions; it is taught to see the weak points, the imperfections of its former expressions; it understands where they hold good, and where they failed; it gets out more of itself than ever before, through the new channels opened to it; it discovers more of its own character by finding better modes in which to manifest it.