The pursuit of knowledge, like the struggle for wealth and place, ends in disillusion, in the disappointment which results from the contrast between what we hope for and what we attain. The greater the success, the more complete the disenchantment. As the rich and famous best see the unsatisfactoriness of wealth and honor, so they who know much best understand how knowledge avails not, how it is but a cloud-built citadel, whose foundations rest upon the uncertain air, whose walls and turrets lose in substance what they gain in height. When we imagine we know all things, we awake as from a dream to find that we know nothing, that our knowing is but a believing, our science but a faith. We are little children who wander in a father's wide domain, seeing many things and understanding not anything, who imagine we are in a real and abiding world, while in truth we are but passing through the picture-gallery of the senses. Faith, Hope, and Love:--these three Are life's deep root; They reach into infinity, Whence life doth shoot. But Faith and Hope have not attained The Eternal best; While Love, sweet Love, the end has gained,-- In God to rest. So long as these life-begetting, life-sustaining, and life-developing powers hold mightier sway over the soul of woman than over that of man, so long will woman's heel crush the serpent's head and woman's arms bear salvation to the world. She will not worship the rising sun, or become the idolatress of success, but within her heart will cherish fallen heroes and lost causes and the memory of all the sorrows by which God humanizes the world. If we consider mankind merely as a phenomenon, the extinction of the race need give us little more concern than the disappearance of Pterodactyls and Ichthyosauri. What repels from such contemplation is not man's physical, but his spiritual being,--that which makes him capable of thought and love, of faith and hope. The universe is anthropomorphized, for whithersoever man looks he sees the reflection of his own countenance. What he calls things are stamped with the impress and likeness of himself, as he himself is an image of the eternal mind, in which all things are mirrored. An atheist or a materialist, an agnostic or a pessimist, may have greater knowledge, greater intellectual force than the most devout believer in God; but is it possible for him to feel so thoroughly at home in the world, to feel so deeply that, whatever happens, it is and will be well with him? In an atheistic world the spirit of man is ill at ease. He who has no God makes himself the centre of all things, and, like a spoiled child, loses the power to admire, to enjoy, and to love. Genuine faith in God is such an infinite force that one may be tempted to doubt whether it is found.