How far may we trust our experience as validating the inferences we draw from it? The Christian thought of God is after all no more than an hypothesis propounded to account for the Christian life. May not our experiences be accounted for in some other way? We must distinguish between the adequacy of our thought of God and the fact that there is a God more or less like our thought of Him. Our experience can never guarantee the entire correctness of our concept of Deity; a child experiences parental love without knowing accurately who its parents are--their characters, position, abilities, etc. But the child's experience of loving care convinces the child that he possesses living parents. Is it likely that, were God a mere fancy, a fancy which we should promptly discard if we knew it as such, our experience could be what it is? An explanation of an experience, which would destroy that experience, is scarcely to be received as an explanation. Religion is incomparably valuable, and to account for it as self-hypnosis would end it for us as a piece of folly. Can life's highest values be so dealt with? Moreover, we cannot settle down comfortably in unbelief; just when we feel most sure that there is no God, something unsettles us, and gives us an uncanny feeling that after all He is, and is seeking us. We find ourselves responding, and once more we are strengthened, encouraged, uplifted. Can a mere imagination compass such results? How shall we test the validity of the inference we draw from our experience? One test is the satisfaction that it gives to _all_ elements in our complex personality. One part of us may be deceived, but that which contents the entire man is not likely to be unreal. Arthur Hallam declared that he liked Christianity because "it fits into all the folds of one's nature." Further, this satisfaction is not temporary but persistent. In childhood, in youth, in middle age, at the gates of death, in countless experiences, the God we infer from our spirit's reactions to Him meets and answers our changing needs. Matthew Arnold writes: "Jesus Christ and His precepts are found to hit the moral experience of mankind; to hit it in the critical points; to hit it lastingly; and, when doubts are thrown upon their really hitting it, then to come out stronger than ever." Unless we are to distrust ourselves altogether, that which appeals to our minds as reasonable, to our hearts as lovable, to our consciences as commanding, and to our souls as adorable, can hardly be "such stuff as dreams are made on." Nor are we looking at ourselves alone. We are confirmed by the completer experiences of the generations who have preceded us. "They looked unto Him and were radiant." Those thousands of beautiful and holy faces in each century, "lit with their loving and aflame with God," can scarcely have been gazing on light kindled solely by their own imaginations.