At the same time the method of evolution is the one adopted by the supreme Mind in its endeavor to awaken in man religious ideas. The exposition of the original faiths--Indian, Chinese, Persian--is a long and eloquent argument for this thesis. All criticism, all thinking, all analysis, all study of history, all investigation of phenomena, point in this direction. This is the rule of creation; this is the solution of the problem of the universe. The successive degrees of this divine ascent, he maintains, are distinctly traceable in the records left for our reading. The threads are fine, of course, but what have we eyes for? It is not necessary that everybody should see them, and the few who can are amply rewarded for the trouble they take in putting their fingers upon the very lines of the heavenly procedure. His peculiar strain of genius admirably qualified him for this delicate task. It was serious, critical, earnest, and aspiring. At one period of his life he was a mystic, wholly absorbed in God, and he always had that tendency towards the more passionate forms of idealism which led him to mystical speculations. The search for God was ever the animating purpose of his endeavor. The law of the blessed life was never absent from his thought. He, all the time, lived by faith, and was naturally disposed to see the gain in all losses. His mind had that penetrating quality which loved to follow hidden trails, and appreciated the subtlest kinds of influence. In a striking passage he speaks of the great mystery in these influences which thoughtless people little dream of, and which common-sense, so called, cares nothing about. In the wonderful manner in which, through books, the spirits of other men, long since dead, enter into and inspire ours; in the eloquent language of eye and lip which without words, merely by expression, conveys deepest feelings; in the presence in our souls of strange presentiments, intuitions of higher knowledge than science or learning can give, voices which seem the presence of other spirits in ours, which make us feel often that death, so far from removing our dear friends from us, brings them nearer to our souls so that they _cannot_ be lost;--in all these wonderful ways we see dimly the unveiling of holy mysteries which the future is to fully open to us, mysteries which we can even now, in our sublimer and holier secret moments, feel trying to disclose themselves to us. This was written in a letter to his sister, on the occasion of a visit to the menagerie to see Herr Driesbach, the horse-tamer. A man who could spring into the empyrean from such ground may be trusted to behold Deity where others behold nothing but dirt; and they who submit to his guidance are pretty certain to come out full believers in the spiritual powers.