ligious faith be undaunted by the vision of the evil of the world. We shall war against this evil in the trust that the highest reality is not against us, but with us, just as we try to comprehend the world with the faith that the highest reality is in conformity with our private reason. In both cases we take the risk, but we take the risk because it is worth taking, because to take it is the highest form of activity. As the faith of science helps to make life rational, so the religious faith helps to make life in the highest sense moral, by insisting that the ideal labors of our moral life are undertaken not alone, but in harmony with the world as known to the Infinite.
To make the parallel a little clearer, we may say that science postulates the truth of the description of the world that, among all the possible descriptions, at once includes the given phenomena and attains the greatest simplicity; while religion assumes the truth of the description of the world that, without falsifying the given facts, arouses the highest moral interest and satisfies the highest moral needs.
All this has often been said, but it has not always been clearly enough joined with the practical suggestion that if one gives up one of these two faiths, he ought consistently to give up the other. If one is weary of the religious postulates, let him by all means throw them aside. But if he does this, why does he not throw aside the scientific postulates, and give up insisting upon it that the world is and must be rational? Yea, let him be thorough-going, and, since the very perception of the walls of his room contains postulates, let him throw away all these
