And if there be no guide of humanity but the intellect, and nothing worthy of its regard but what that intellect can isolate and describe in the forms peculiar to its operations,--that is, if a man has relations to nothing beyond his definition, is not a creature of the immeasurable,--then these men are right.

But there have appeared along with them other thinkers who could not thus be satisfied--men who had in their souls a hunger which the neatest laws of nature could not content, who could not live on chemistry, or mathematics, or even on geology, without the primal law of _their_ many dim-dawning wonders--that is, the Being, if such there might be, who thought their laws first and then embodied them in a world of aeonian growth.

These indeed seek law likewise, but a perfect law--a law they can believe perfect beyond the comprehension of powers of whose imperfection they are too painfully conscious.

They feel in their highest moments a helplessness that drives them to search after some Power with a heart deeper than his power, who cares for the troubled creatures he has made.

But still under the influence of that faithless hunger for intellectual certainty, they look about and divide into two parties: both would gladly receive the reported revelation in Jesus, the one if they could have evidence enough from without, the other if they could only get rid of the difficulties it raises within.