The truth can take care of itself, and of us, too. Nothing is dangerous that is the truth. And a lie is always septic.

Let us stick to the truth, “as God gives us to see the right," and confidently follow whithersoever it leads.

This is real faith in the truth. That sort of faith that asks what effect will my belief have, will it harm young people, or disturb the faithful, or cause trouble—that is not faith in the truth, it is half doubt. For it does not believe that always, anywhere, the truth is safest and wisest.

The greatest thinking that has been done in this world has been done by modest people. Socrates had perhaps the greatest brain ever housed in a human skull, and he was fond of saying, “I know nothing." He was always asking questions.

If you are teachable there is not a person in all the world from whom you cannot learn something. You are in a continuous and crowded university, and the humblest chance acquaintance can add to your valuable store of thought.

The greatest foe to clear thinking is egotism. It shuts the door upon development. A thought has no added weight because it is your thought.

For this reason consistency is not something we should seek after. We should seek after the truth,

even if what we learn today is inconsistent with what we thought yesterday.

9. Recognize the Function of Faith

That is, recognize that all the higher, most important, and most vital truths are to be apprehended, not by the intellect, but by faith.

This does not mean that we should believe what the intelligence condemns, but that we are to be. lieve when the matter lies entirely beyond the reach of the intelligence.

The best things in life are not knowable. They are believable,

For instance, love is "the greatest thing in the world.” But you can never know that your beloved loves you, you believe it. And that faith is just as sure as any knowledge, as that two and two make four. In fact we live by it. We do not live by mathematics.

We do not know that our dead live on. We believe it. It is not a knowable fact. But because we live our lives in the presence of eternity, because the consciousness of immortality penetrates all we think and do, we are made noble, heroic, great. And if, by faith, we do not grasp this truth, we become pessimistic, brutal, sensual, and spend our days on the plane of “eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die." We do not know there is a God. Yet the idea of God has always been present in the race. It got there, it stays there, by faith. And it is the chief source of all morals, decency, and grandeur of-soul. Without it the world would be a wretched place.

So all that makes of man a spirit and not ar animal, a great creature dominated by high principles, and not a despicable creature dominated by his lusts, comes to him by faith.

Faith then is a necessary function in thought, not to make us accept absurdities or untruths, and construct "a cosmos without facts," but to lay hold of those facts of the spirit-much more valuable to life than the facts of the body—that can never possibly be proven or disproven, that lie entirely beyond the range of the kind of knowledge we use in the kitchen or laboratory.

So long as we are something more than kitchen and laboratory animals we shall need faith.

10. Recognize the Function of Love I speak of love, as I spoke of faith, not in its sentimental aspect, but to call attention to its effect upon the intellectual processes.

It is commonly said that love is blind. There never was a greater error. For love is the only thing that can see. It is hate that is blind, and coldness.

You cannot understand anything unless you love it, neither a book nor a child.

This mortal frame is so complex, soul and body are so inblent, intellect and passion so interwoven, that each affects the other.

We are not constructed in "water-tight compartments." Our ideas alter our emotions, our passions influence our thoughts.

We have an example, in the action of the "intellectuals" of Germany, when they rushed to the defence of the frightfulness of the German army, of how hate distorts and destroys the power to think straight.

The devil, they say, is very wise and cunning, and may know as much as God, perhaps, but God not only knows. He loves. Wisdom becomes omniscience only when love is added to it.

Love is the light of the mind.

Let us follow these hints, in so far as they commend themselves to us. Let us add to them from our own stock of experience.

For we can think straight even if we act crooked, but we can never act straight if we think crooked.

TEN WAYS TO TEST THE FINENESS OF A

MAN

When it comes to superiority-most of us are mixed. Someone once asked Peter Cartwright if he was “entirely sanctified”; after a moment's reflection the old pioneer preacher replied, “I think I am-in streaks."

Most of us are Superior in streaks, and doubtless find ourselves Inferior and Common in many respects. But at least it may help us to know what real superiority is, to know the goal, to know some sort of yardstick by which to measure ourselves.

Some people are better than others. All men are not equal. Some are finer, higher, better bred, nobler than others.

The world has always believed it. And what mankind has believed for a thousand years, what it keeps on believing, generation after generation, must have some truth in it. Pure lies cannot live long; they must be well salted with truth to persist.

We have always had our aristocracies. Caste is ingrained in human thought. The superiority