And now, while I have endeavoured thus clearly to show you that religion, like morality, has no answer, properly speaking, to scepticism—but that it rests upon an act of faith in answer to what is ever saying, How, what, and why?—let us come back then to that point at which we left it last night. That is the point at which we saw, that in order to be moral, and to believe in morality, we must exercise an act of faith, we must trust in ourselves, in our own higher and better nature. It must be an act of faith which never can justify itself to the understanding. Submit the understanding to the soul, elevate the conscience above the merely logical and questioning faculty; say by the exercise of a higher faculty, say by the power of that instinct of faith, which is given us for the very purpose that we may rise above the instinct of doubt—say, I know that this is right and this is true, while I have a soul. There is in the heart of every human being an eternal opposition between the merely sceptical understanding and the spiritual faculty, between that which demonstrates and that which believes, between the mind which we share with the animal, and the soul which we Christians believe we specially derive from God; and these two are opposite the one to the other. That in us which says, This must be so, this shall be so so, is a higher faculty than that which in us inquires, Why is it so, how can this be so? And that act of faith in us on which our morality, our religion, and our higher forms of being rest, is that by which we assert the supremacy of the one above the other. We are not always conscious, nor often conscious, of this contradiction in our innermost nature, of the opposition between the spiritual part of our nature and the mere fleshly man. There are times, however, when we feel conscious of it. There are times when to each one of us comes some dire and deadly temptation, when we find ourselves in the presence of some coveted object, when the animal craves for its gratification, and the spirit trembles at the thought of the unlawful thing; and then we find the serpent intellect pleading in an ingenious way that there is no law against it. I say, there is not in this church a single man or woman who has not felt the eternal opposition between the spirit and the flesh; who has not felt that his deliverance from temptation, the mastery over the evil thing that was leading him on to evil, lies not in any logic or demonstration, but in the submission of the logical faculty to the spiritual, in saying to the animal part of our nature, Be silent, submit, I will be righteous, I will not sin. I say, in that moment we do become conscious of the opposition that exists between the intellectual and spiritual part of our nature. It is then that the great billows of our souls are ebbing and flowing in the agony of our temptation. It is at that time we feel the innermost parts of our being, the fountains of the great deep broken up; and then the spirit says, I will be righteous. And though we are not conscious of it, though the animal has been accustomed to obey the man, there is this secret opposition between the two. It is in the nature of what oculists tell us. They tell us, that the image of an object is inverted on the retina of the eye, and that it is only by constant habit of correction of the impression that we see things truly. So there is the natural inversion of the nature of the man; the animal gets the upper hand in the man, and it is only by the unconscious training of the man in Christian society that the supremacy of the moral part of the man is strongly established; and we are not conscious of the act of faith, but still that act of faith underlies all morality, and it is true in morality as in religion, “The just shall live by faith.” There is no righteous deed that any one of us has done that we did not do by virtue of this act of faith; “The just shall live by faith.”