The comparison between these two Nihilistic tendencies might be pushed farther, but it has been carried far enough for our purpose. Both sorts, when viewed as principles of practical life, coincide in yielding the conclusion we now wish to deduce. It is folly to be deterred from the pursuit of ultimate truth, by any amount of speculative difficulty whatsoever. And the reason is plain. Practical truths--the beliefs which affect our hearts and lives--are always ultimate truths. To give them up, is to give up our highest and best,--perhaps our all. It is worse than useless to quail before intellectual obstacles. The Difficult soon begins to appear the Impossible. And soon the result ensues, which might naturally be expected. Is it possible to imagine any discouragement heavier, than the feeling that we can effect little to acquire a knowledge of truth, goodness, and God;--a feeling, that do what we will, all we want most--all that is truly Divine--must remain to us a darkness or a dream? Let any man think in his heart, that what ought to rule his life, and raise him higher than his lower self, is a secret unknowable, and he loses the fear of doing wrong;--for how can he help it?--and the hope of a brighter and better future;--for how shall he attain it? Then, he sits down to wrap himself in cynical self-sufficingness. Inevitable ignorance is soon developed into intellectual Pessimism. The death of hope and fear, makes the man himself a moral Pessimist. Our conscience, sympathy, devotion, happiness in higher and in lower things alike,--if unstirred by vivid emotions--must become dull and blunted. Next follows "The waveless calm, the slumber of the dead;"-- a state of suspended animation, broken only by fierce stimulants--the galvanisms of, our lower life. These are succeeded, in due course, by spasmodic susceptibilities, which demand at no distant day the anodyne and the narcotic. And-- "Oh, that way madness lies!"-- Therefore we repeat it,--and it cannot too often or too earnestly be repeated,--let no man excuse himself from the pursuit of practical truth[z] by any amount of speculative difficulty whatsoever. It would be a false optimism to say there is no difficulty in thinking truly;--to represent its difficulties as trifles;--or to forget the painful fact that they beset our age of cold erudite criticism, like pitfalls in the Valley of the Shadow of Death. But, must not all things really great and good be toilsome to men who are neither very good nor very great? And have we not, every one of us, who tries to be good, our proper fields of hard yet repaying work? The bee gathers honey where one idle schoolboy sees only thorns and briers--and where another sucks poison.