All power of growth and service depends, know it or not as we may, on an ideal faith in somewhat all-sufficient, unerring, infinitely wise and tender, inseparable from the inmost of life, bent on our good as we are not, set against our failures as we cannot be. It means that there can in fact be no philosophy of life, no law of good, no belief in duty, no aspiration, but must have such in-dwelling perfection, as being alone reliable to guarantee its word. This only is my God; infinite ground of all finite being; essence of reason and good.... When you see a function of memory, or a law of perfection, let your natural piety recognize it as wise and just and good and fair. Be loyal to the moral authority that affirms it ought to be, and somehow must be. Let your _soul_ bring in the leap of your mind to grasp it. Then, if you cannot see God in perfect, absolute essence, you will know the Infinite and Eternal in their relation to real and positive existence; feel their freedom in your own; know their inseparableness from every movement of your spiritual being.... The love we feel, the truth we pursue, the honor we cherish, the moral beauty we revere, blend in with the eternity of the principles they flow from, and then, glad as in the baptism of a harvest morning, expanding towards human need and the universal life of man, our souls walk free, breathing immortal air. That is God,--not an object but an experience. Words are but symbols, they do not define. We say "Him," "It" were as well, if thereby we mean life, wisdom, love.... Must we bind our communion with the just, the good, the true, the humanly adequate and becoming to some personal life, some special body of social circumstances, some individual's work in human progress and upon human idealism? How should that be, when the principles into which the moral sense flowers out in its maturity as spiritual liberty, essentially involve a freely advancing ideal at every new stage revealing more of God, whom nothing but such universal energy can adequately reveal?... If then, we cannot see the eternal substance and life of the universe, it is not because Deity is too far, but because it is too near. We can measure a statue or a star, and look round and beyond it; but the Life, Light, Liberty, Love, Peace, whereby we live and know, and are helpful and calm and free, which measures and surrounds and even animates us, is itself the very mystery of our being, and known only as felt and lived. God stands in all ideal thought, conviction, aim, which ever reach into the infinite; and thence, as if an angel should stand in the sun, come attractions that draw forth the divine capabilities within us, as the sun the life and beauty of the earth. God is the inmost motive,