I need not remind you how through Neo-Platonism, St. Augustine, and the Scholastic renaissance, these conceptions became imbedded in Christian philosophy; and what a reversal occurred of the original practical principle of Christianity. Belief is henceforth important because it is the mere antecedent in a finite and fallen world, a temporal and phenomenal world infected with non-being, of true knowledge to be achieved only in a world of completed Being. Desire is but the self-consciousness of defect striving to its own termination in perfect possession, through perfect knowledge of perfect being. I need not remind you that the _prima facie_ subordination of reason to authority, of knowledge to faith, in the medieval code, is, after all, but the logical result of the doctrine that man as man (since only reasoning desire) is merely phenomenal; and has his reality in God, who as God is the complete union of rational insight and being--the term of man’s desire, and the fulfilment of his feeble attempts at knowing. Authority, “faith” as it then had to be conceived, meant just that this Being comes externally to the aid of man, otherwise hopelessly doomed to misery in long drawn out error and non-being, and disciplines him till, in the next world under more favoring auspices, he may have his desires stilled in good, and his faith may yield to knowledge:--for we forget that the doctrine of immortality was not an appendage, but an integral part of the theory that since knowledge is the _true_ function of man, happiness is attained only in knowledge, which itself exists only in achievement of perfect Being or God. For my part, I can but think that medieval absolutism, with its provision for authoritative supernatural assistance in this world and assertion of supernatural realization in the next, was more logical, as well as more humane, than the modern absolutism, that, with the same logical premises, bids man find adequate consolation and support in the fact that, after all, his strivings are already eternally fulfilled, his errors already eternally transcended, his partial beliefs already eternally comprehended.