The self-education of a child is achieved by a continual process of verification of his speculative thought by evidence. His ideas are regulated by the evidence he can deduce capable of realising them, when they are instantly registered as experience, which forms an ever-broadening base for further speculative flights of the imagination. As the mind matures, this faculty of speculative thought[44] becomes, under the name of initiative, the germ of all undertakings calling for personal direction and action. A man undertakes to do certain things because he has confidence in his executive powers. He has experienced the evidence of his capability and verified his powers, and he therefore dares to go boldly forward into wider fields of action. A child still crudely experimenting for evidence of the truth of his own small infantine powers of apprehension, has as yet no conception of yet vaster knowledge awaiting his more matured mind. The knowledge and power possessed by his father are a mystery to him, calling forth his respect and awe, so that he scarcely dares to think he may one day be as wise himself. The knowledge of God and of Infinite Truth which a man has not in its completeness is a mystery to him, calling forth his respect and awe as his own powers inspire his little son with a like veneration. But nothing forbids a man from changing the mystery of[45] God into a knowledge of God, if he have understanding capable of meeting the revelation, just as there is nothing to forbid a child from making the mystery of his father's knowledge his own possession if he have adequate power of comprehension. Evidence is a proper test of all truths possible of comprehension, but it is no test of the existence of Infinite Truth, by which the world and the affairs of men are formed for a purpose withheld as yet in its entirety from the imperfect human understanding. Where it has been given to man to penetrate some way into the knowledge of so-called Natural Law, a beautiful coherency in the structure and continuity of life has always been observed. The Unity of Nature, and the working together of the Whole of Life, is a fact, the evidence of which has been deduced and declared over and over again in corroborative detail as the results of scientific investigation. Could the history of the intellectual attainments of man be to-day unrolled[46] before his wondering gaze, there would, we are told, appear no break in the perfect continuity of his ascending life, but instead a perpetual adjustment of the evidence of his speculative thought—of evidence so contrived as to keep pace with his capacity to understand. And could his future history be in a like manner revealed to him to-day; could he foresee that mysteries, now so incomprehensible, are yet destined to be comprehended by him as knowledge, we are justified in believing there would appear the same beautiful coherency in his spiritual evolution which has marked his material progress in the past.