The mind that is not profound enough to perceive and believe even what it cannot comprehend,--that is the shoal. Unless the reason will permit the sounding-lead to fall illimitably down into a submarine world of mystery, too deep for the diver, and yet a true and living world,--unless there is admitted to be a fathomless gulf, called _faith_, underlying the surface-sea of demonstration, the race will surely ground in time, and go to pieces. There is the peril of this all-prevailing love of the real. It may become such an infatuation that nothing will appear actual which is not visible or demonstrable, which the hand cannot handle or the intellect weigh and measure. Even to this extreme may the reason run. Its vulnerable point is pride. It is easily encouraged by success, easily incited to conceit, readily inclined to overestimate its power. It has a Chinese weakness for throwing up a wall on its involuntary boundary-line, and for despising and defying all that is beyond its jurisdiction. The reason may be the greatest or the meanest faculty in the soul. It may be the most wise or the most foolish of active things. It may be so profound as to acknowledge a whole infinitude of truth which it cannot comprehend, or it may be so superficial as to suspect everything it is asked to believe, and refuse to trust a fact out of its sight. There is the danger of the day. There is the lee-shore upon which the tendencies of the age are blowing our bark: a gross and destructive materialism, which is the horrid and treacherous development of a shallow realism. In the midst of this splendid era there is a fast-increasing class who are disposed to make the earth the absolute All,--to deny any outlet from it,--to deny any capacity in man for another sphere,--to deny any attribute in God which interests Him in man,--to shut out, therefore, all faith, all that is mysterious, all that is spiritual, all that is immortal, all that is Divine. "There live, alas! of heaven-directed mien, Of cultured soul, and sapient eye serene, Who hail thee Man!--the pilgrim of a day, Spouse of the worm, and brother of the clay, Frail as the leaf in autumn's yellow bower, Dust in the wind, or dew upon the flower, A friendless slave, a child without a sire. * * * * * Are these the pompous tidings ye proclaim, Lights of the world, and demigods of Fame? Is this your triumph, this your proud applause, Children of Truth, and champions of her cause? For this hath Science searched on weary wing, By shore and sea, each mute and living thing? Launched with Iberia's pilot from the steep, To worlds unknown, and isles beyond the deep? Or round the cope her living chariot driven, And wheeled in triumph through the signs of heaven? O star-eyed Science, hast thou wandered there, To waft us home the message of despair?"