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THE SCIENCE OF RELIGION

pleasure and pain, petty love and hate, etc.—had almost receded from your mind. Pure Bliss and tranquillity had been welling up in your heart and you were enjoying an unruffled calm—Bliss and contentment. Though this kind of higher experience does not often come to all, yet there can be no doubt of the fact that all men, some time or other, in prayer or in mood of worship or meditation, perceive it in a less marked degree, at least. Is this not a proof of the existence of God? What other direct proof than the existence of Bliss in ourselves in real prayer or worship can we give of the existence and nature of God? Though there is the cosmological proof of the existence of God,—from effect we rise to cause, from the world to the world-maker,—and there is the teleological proof as well, from the telos (plan, adaptation) in the world, we rise to the Supreme Intelligence that makes the plan and adaptation. There is also the moral proof—from conscience and the sense of perfection we