“‘Not that I have learned much yet. I have only begun to get glimpses of the truth. I feel sure of far less now than I did five years ago. But I know this: I do know and see beyond peradventure that it is right to probe to the uttermost the problems which confront me. I should have been false to myself, unfaithful to my highest, truest instinct, if I had listened to the tearful advice of my timid friends and turned my back and shut my eyes to what God would reveal to me. I did not know where I should be led; my knees knocked together with fear as I felt my way through the gloom. But gradually, and chiefly from the writings of that man whose teachings we heard this morning, have I learned not only to believe, but to know the truths which he taught us to-day. Some men call him skeptic, rationalist; at best they say, such talk must be unpractical. Fools! not to know that to save a soul from hopeless despair, to give life and health to an immortal spirit, is quite as practical a thing as to pave streets and cut coats. “‘I look upon a true philosophy as the most completely useful thing in the world.’ He stopped, and I looked up bewildered. “‘Useful?’ I asked. “‘Certainly; useful. Is not that useful which gives man a clear insight into what must otherwise be forever obscure? Is it not useful to lift him out of the domain of prejudice and mere opinion on vital matters, and give him the key to the universe by making him to know the grounds of his knowledge, of his being, and of his destiny?’ “‘But do you not believe in relying on faith at all? Do you accept nothing that you do not understand?’ I asked. “‘I understand very few things that my reason compels me to accept,’ answered Mr. Everett. ‘I do not understand the chemical change which transmutes my food into living animal matter, and I do not understand a million things which I believe. Certainly we must have faith. All business and all life depends upon faith. But by faith I do not mean the simple credulity of my childhood in everything that I was taught. By faith I mean a steadfast reliance on what my reason tells me is true, even though I have no immediate evidence of it, and imagination and understanding fail to compass it. When I see the apparently useless suffering and cruelty which the Supreme Power has permitted, I have faith in his infinite goodness, not because any man or book has told me that it is so, but because, thank God, I see that it is so; and it is philosophic study alone which has made me see this. He who is afraid to study and question into the nature of the universe “and trust the Rock of Ages to his chemic test” is the man who has no true faith.’ “‘But after all,’ I said, ‘you must admit that the philosophers are but little read. It is the practical, common-sense people of the world who have done the work, and they have got on very well, too, without all this theorizing.’