Page:An analysis of religious belief (1877).djvu/722

 There is nothing in the phenomena which can satisfy our mental demand for absolute being. As being transient, and as being relative, the phenomena in fact are nothing. But our intellectual, our emotional, and our moral natures demand the [Greek: to hontôs on]—that which really is, as the necessary completion of [Greek: ta phainomea]—that which only appears. And it is precisely the unshakeable belief in an unchangeable, though unknowable Reality; an everlasting Truth amid shifting forms, a Substance among shadows, which forms the universal foundation of religious faith.

A ship that has been driven from her intended course is drifting, with a crew who have no clear knowledge of her whereabouts, upon an unexplored ocean. Suddenly her captain exclaims that he sees land in the distance. The mate, however, summoned to verify the captain's observation, fancies that the black speck on the horizon is not land, but a large vessel. The sailors and passengers take part, some with the one, some with the other; while many of them form opinions of their own not agreeing with that of either, one maintaining it to be a whale, another a dark cloud, a third something else, and so forth. Minor differences abound. Those who take it to be land are at issue as to its being a plain or a mountain, those who think it a vessel cannot agree as to the description of the craft. One solitary passenger sees nothing at all. Instead of drawing what would appear to be the most obvious conclusion, that he is either more shortsighted or less apt to discover distant objects than the rest, he infers that his vision alone is right, and that of all the others, captain, passengers, and crew, defective and misleading. Oblivious of the fact that the mere failure to perceive an object is no proof of its non-existence, he persists in asserting not only that the speck seen in the distance, being so variously described, probably does not resemble any of the ideas formed of it on board the ship, but that there is no speck at all. Even the fact that the crews of many other ships, passing in this direction, perceive the same dim outline on the horizon, does not shake his conviction that it is a mere "idol of the tribe." Such is the procedure of those who deny the reality of the object of the religious idea. Instead of drawing from the diversity of creeds the legitimate inference that the Being of