The idle man does not know what it is to rest. Hard work, moreover, tends not only to give us rest for the body, but, what is even more important, peace to the mind. If we have done our best to do, and to be, we can rest in peace. "En la sua voluntade é nostra pace." [11] In His will is our peace; and in such peace the mind will find its truest delight, for "When care sleeps, the soul wakes." In youth, as is right enough, the idea of exertion, and of struggles, is inspiriting and delightful; but as years advance the hope and prospect of peace and of rest gain ground gradually, and "When the last dawns are fallen on gray, And all life's toils and ease complete, They know who work, not they who play, If rest is sweet." [12] [1] Gray. [2] Jefferies. [3] Tennyson. [4] Emerson. [5] Morris. [6] Coleridge. [7] Goethe. [8] Ruskin. [9] Epictetus. [10] From Sir M. S. Grant Duff's _A Winter in Syria_. [11] Dante. [12] Symonds. CHAPTER XI. RELIGION. "For what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God."--MICAH. "Pure religion and undefiled is this, to visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world."--JAMES I. "The letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life." 2 CORINTHIANS. CHAPTER XI. RELIGION. It would be quite out of place here to enter into any discussion of theological problems or to advocate any particular doctrines. Nevertheless I could not omit what is to most so great a comfort and support in sorrow and suffering, and a source of the purest happiness. We commonly, however, bring together under this term two things which are yet very different: the religion of the heart, and that of the head. The first deals with conduct, and the duties of Man; the second with the nature of the supernatural and the future of the soul, being in fact a branch of knowledge. Religion should be a strength, guide, and comfort, not a source of intellectual anxiety or angry argument. To persecute for religion's sake implies belief in a jealous, cruel, and unjust Deity. If we have done our best to arrive at the truth, to torment oneself about the result is to doubt the goodness of God, and, in the words of Bacon, "to bring down the Holy Ghost, instead of the likeness of a dove, in the shape of a raven." "The letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life," and the first duty of religion is to form the highest possible conception of God.