We must, no doubt, admit that there may be very much which the human intellect can not fathom nor see through. This it would by no means be difficult to prove. And still more easy were it to show that man’s will can not always give the law, but must often submit to and recognize a higher and more universal authority. And as regards the fancy, every one will be ready--not to say forward--to make a somewhat similar admission. The faculty of imagination, sensuous and material in its origin and in its operation, and always remaining in the highest degree subjective, is liable to innumerable illusions, to which we ascribe no value, or, rather, which we carefully endeavor to dispel from our minds, whenever we attempt to penetrate into the inmost essence of the highest truth which it is the object of faith to embrace. That, moreover, the reason, no less than the fancy, has its peculiar--one might almost say, its innate--optical delusions, must be but too well known to every one who has made the slightest progress in the art of logic, and advanced beyond the mere elements of a philosophical examination of this faculty. All this, however, is only a negative nature. The mere recognition and acknowledgment of the fact that we can and ought to restrain our reason and reserve our judgment whenever a higher act of faith comes into question--or, in other words, that in such a case the absolute reason, with its logical processes and laws of thought, is not alone qualified to decide, but meets with limits which it is unable to surmount--such concessions do not lead to any positive result. They do but establish the possibility of a faith which may transcend and is not confined within these bounds. While, however, they lead to the inference that such a faith is thoroughly conceivable, and that while it transcends the reason is, nevertheless, rational, and capable of being brought into perfect unison with the sound reason, they do not by any means establish at once its reality. All this is rather the preparatory step to believing, and not the true living faith itself. A true living faith (and we are here speaking of the function of believing, rather than of the particular details of a positive creed), is nothing else than the reception into the soul of the truth given unto us by God. And inasmuch as the soul is in its origin loving, and, indeed, the very faculty of love, a true living faith can not be thought of or exist without this accompaniment of love, which is even its distinctive characteristic.