Vain boasting! The gates of knowledge have been opened, but we have merely got a peep at what lies within. And man, so far from being king of the universe, is but as a speck on the fly-wheel that controls the mighty machinery of creation. What we know is infinitesimal to what we do not know. We have delved in the fields of science, but as yet our ploughshares have merely scratched the tiniest portion of the surface,--the furrow that lies in the distance is unending. In the infinite book of knowledge we have just turned over a few of the first pages; but as it is infinite, alas! we can never hope to reach the final page, for there is no final page. What we have accomplished is but as a mere drop in the ocean, whose waves wash the continents of eternity. No scholar, no scientist can bound those continents, can tell the limits to which they stretch, inasmuch as they are illimitable. Ask the most learned _savant_ if he can fix the boundaries of space, and he will answer,--No! Ask him if he can define _mind_ and _matter_, and you will receive the same answer. "What is mind? It is no matter." "What is matter? Never mind." The atom formerly thought to be indivisible and the smallest particle of matter has been reduced to molecules, corpuscles, ions, and electrons; but the nature, the primal cause of these, the greatest scientists on earth are unable to determine. Learning is as helpless as ignorance when brought up against this stone-wall of mystery. _The effect_ is seen, but the _cause_ remains indeterminable. The scientist, gray-haired in experience and experiment, knows no more in this regard than the prattling child at its mother's knee. The child asks,--"Who made the world?" and the mother answers, "God made the world." The infant mind, suggestive of the future craving for knowledge, immediately asks,--"Who is God?" Question of questions to which the philosopher and the peasant must give the same answer,--"God is the infinite, the eternal, the source of all things, the _alpha_ and _omega_ of creation, from Him all came, to Him all must return." He is the beginning of Science, the foundation on which our edifice of knowledge rests. We hear of the conflict between Science and Religion. There is no conflict, can be none, for all Science must be based on faith,--faith in Him who holds worlds and suns "in the hollow of His hand." All our great scientists have been deeply religious men, acknowledging their own insignificance before Him who fills the universe with His presence.