During this period of mental struggle to work out a philosophy of life which should fill the vacuum created by the collapse of theology, I was frequently approached by well-meaning, but over-confident, teachers who, in their own opinion, at any rate, had completely and satisfactorily reconciled religion with Reason. Nearly every mail brought me letters recommending some publication which would answer all my difficulties as it had theirs. Not a few of my would-be helpers went to the trouble of calling on me with the same object in view. I shall only speak here of one of the books which was supposed to have untied all the knots, divine and human, which have ever perplexed the brain of man. The book came to me highly recommended. Even President Eliot of Harvard had publicly endorsed it. While it was many years after the period I am now writing of, that my attention was called to this book, nevertheless, it is because the book is typical of the efforts to make Reason approve of the fundamentals of the popular faith, that I reproduce here what I said of it at the time: _Balance_ is the name of a little book with a great aim. Its author, Mr. Orlando Smith, sets out as a new Columbus to discover not another earth, but another truth, which shall give to all known truths new meaning and worth. This truth, he believes, he has discovered, and christens it, "The Fundamental Verity." Lucid illustrations are massed together with telling effect, to show that Nature is equipped with a self-curative genius which makes discord an impossibility. That which is overdone in one direction is underdone equally in an opposite direction. This rhythm, this equivalence which pulls the pendulum in one direction as far as it pushes it in another is the _Fundamental Verity_, which, if grasped as universal and infallible, will remove from our shoulders what Shakespeare calls "the weary weight of all this unintelligible world," and bring Religion and Science, the two gladiatorial contestants in the modern arena, to replace their quarrelous weapons, with which they have given and received gashes deep and bloody, with the olive branch of peace and concord. Having undertaken to demonstrate that the physical world is in the embrace of laws which forever evolve order out of confusion, and that Balance is supreme in every detail of life, from the most momentous to the most minute, that throughout the length and breadth of the universe the account balances perfectly; and that Nature has no failures, and bad debts; that Balance forbids wrong, such for instance as the victory of one force over another, the author believes he has found in this law the unanswerable demonstration for the existence of a Supreme Being who is the author of _Balance_ in the universe and of the immortality of the soul. Thus, having given to these two ambitious propositions a new front, he concludes he has reconciled Religion with Science.