Ch. 18 - Faith and Knowledge

Truth can never be at variance with truth, science can never militate
against faith: we naturally speak of them both in their purity: they
respond to and they strengthen man's most glorious thought:
_immortality_. And yet you may say, "I was more peaceful, I was safer
when, as a child, I closed my eyes on my mother's breast and slept
without thought or care, wrapping myself up simply in faith." This
prescience, this compound of understanding in everything, this
entering of the one link into the other from eternity to eternity,
tears away from me a support--my confidence in prayer; that which is,
as it were, the wings wherewith to fly to my God! If it be loosened,
then I fall powerless in the dust, without consolation or hope.

I bend my energies, it is true, towards attaining the great and
glorious light of knowledge, but it appears to me that therein is
human arrogance: it is, as one should say, "I will be as wise as God."
"That you shall be!" said the serpent to our first parents when it
would seduce them to eat of the tree of knowledge. Through my
understanding I must acknowledge the truth of what the astronomer
teaches and proves. I see the wonderful, eternal omniscience of God in
the whole creation of the world--in the great and in the small, where
the one attaches itself to the other, is joined with the other, in an
endless harmonious entireness; and I tremble in my greatest need and
sorrow. What can my prayer change, where everything is law, from
eternity to eternity?

You tremble as you see the Almighty, who reveals Himself in all
loving-kindness--that Creator, according to man's expression, whose
understanding and heart are one--you tremble when you know that he has
elected you to immortality.

I know it in the faith, in the holy, eternal words of the Bible.
Knowledge lays itself like a stone over my grave, but my faith is that
which breaks it.

Now, thus it is! The smallest flower preaches from its green stalk, in
the name of knowledge--_immortality_. Hear it! the beautiful also
bears proofs of immortality, and with the conviction of faith and
knowledge, the immortal will not tremble in his greatest need; the
wings of prayer will not droop: you will believe in the eternal laws
of love, as you believe in the laws of sense.

When the child gathers flowers in the fields and brings us the whole
handful, where one is erect and the other hangs the head, thrown as it
were among one another, then it is that we see the beauty in every one
by itself--that harmony in colour and in form, which pleases our eye
so well. We arrange them instinctively, and every single beauty is
blended together in one entire beauteous group. We do not look at the
flower,