and this room, in its time-symbol, is bounded by darkness on the one hand, and darkness on the other. Whence I came and whither I go are dark: how can I live in peace without the God who ordered it thus? Faith is my only refuge--an absolute belief in a being so much beyond myself, that he can do all for this _me_ with utter satisfaction to this _me_, protecting all its rights, jealously as his own from which they spring, that he may make me at last one with himself who is my deeper self, inasmuch as his thought of me is my life. And not to know him, even if I could go on living and happy without him, is death. It may be said, "Why all this? Why not go on like a brave man to meet your fate, careless of what that fate may be?" "But what if this fate _should_ depend on myself? Am I to be careless then?" I answer. "The fate is so uncertain! If it be annihilation, why quail before it? Cowardice at least is contemptible." "Is not indifference more contemptible? That one who has once thought should not care to go on to think? That this glory should perish--is it no grief? Is life not a good with all its pain? Ought one to be willing to part with a good? Ought he not to cleave fast thereto? Have you never grudged the coming sleep, because you must cease for the time to _be_ so much as you were before? For my part, I think the man who can go to sleep without faith in God has yet to learn what being is. He who knows not God cannot, however, have much to lose in losing being. And yet--and yet--did he never love man or woman or child? Is he content that there should be no more of it? Above all, is he content to go on with man and woman and child now, careless of whether the love is a perishable thing? If it be, why does he not kill himself, seeing it is all a lie--a false appearance of a thing too glorious to be fact, but for which our best nature calls aloud--and cannot have it? If one knew for certain that there was no life beyond this, then the noble thing would be to make the best of this, yea even then to try after such things as are written in the Gospel as we call it--for they _are_ the noblest. That I am sure of, whatever I may doubt. But not to be sure of annihilation, and yet choose it to be true, and act as if it were true, seems to me to indicate a nature at strife with immortality--bound for the dust by its own choice--of the earth, and returning to the dust." The man will say, "That is yielding everything. Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die. I am of the dust, for I believe in nothing beyond."