Growth in the knowledge of God is a kind of progress which can have absolutely no end, for the truth to be realised is infinite truth; truth unlimited by time or space; truth involved in all actual existence, and containing the fulness of inexhaustible possibilities. It is, I shall conclude by adding, a kind of progress which underlies and determines all other progress. Whenever our views of truth, of righteousness, of love, of happiness rise above experience; whenever we have ideals of existence and conduct which transcend the actual world and actual life; whenever we have longings for a perfection and blessedness which finite things and finite persons cannot confer upon us,--our minds and hearts are really, although it may be unconsciously, feeling after God, if haply they may find Him. It is only in and through God that there is anything to correspond to these ideals and longings. If man be himself the highest and best of beings, how comes it that all the noblest of his race should be haunted and possessed as they are by aspirations after what is higher and better than themselves--by visions of a truth, beauty, and holiness which they have not yet attained--by desires for a blessedness which neither earth nor humanity can bestow? Must not, in that case, his ideals be mere dreams--his longings mere delusions? Pessimists like Schopenhauer and Hartmann and their followers, openly avow that they believe them to be so; that the history of the world is but the series of illusions through which these ideals and longings have impelled humanity; that our ideals never have been and never will be realised; that our longings never have been and never will be satisfied, for, "behold, all is vanity." I believe them to be quite logical in thinking so, seeing that they have ceased to believe in God, who is the ideal which alone gives meaning to all true ideals, who can alone satisfy the deeper spiritual longings of the heart, and likeness to whom is the goal of all mental, moral, and religious progress. Of course, if the pessimists can persuade mankind that the sources of progress are not the truths and affections by which Infinite Goodness is drawing men to itself, but mere fictions of their own brains and flatteries of their own hearts, progress must soon cease. When a delusion is seen through, the power of it is gone. But the pessimists will not, we may trust, succeed. They will mislead for a time, as they are now misleading, certain unstable minds; but the main result of their activity must be just the opposite of what they anticipate. It must be that men will prize more the doctrines the most opposite to the dreary view of life and history which they propagate. Pessimism must send the philosophical few back with deepened reverence and quickened insight to Plato, in order to master more thoroughly, and take to heart more seriously, his great message to the world, that the actual and the ideal meet and harmonise