The Balance Wheel.

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REV. GEORGE R. HEWITT, B.D.

VERYWHERE in the material universe we behold steadfast order and beauty as the result of equilibrium between opposing forces. In the movements of the heavenly bodies stability is due to the beautiful balance between two forces, one of which tends to make the whirling worlds fly apart, and the other of which tends to make them fly together. In like manner, in the structure of our living bodies, stability is the result of equilibrium between the vital force which builds the molecules together and the chemical force which tears them down.

As in the realm of matter so in the realm of mind and of morals, stability and order are the result of a proper balance between conflicting powers. We frequently hear it said of certain men that "they lack balance," or that their "mind has lost its balance." They are unsteady. They act sometimes in a way that seems strange and unaccountable to their fellow men. Socrates used to say that all men were a little insane, for they all at times did things that seemed ridiculous and strange to others.

A perfectly sane or sound mind is a perfectly balanced mind. Man needs a balance wheel that his movements may be regular, orderly, and steady. Whatever serves for the regulation and co-ordination of movements is figuratively speaking called a balance wheel.

(1) Such a balance wheel in the practical conduct of life is good common sense or sound judgment, or in other words discernment of the proper thing to do and to say and of the

proper time to do and say it. Common sense is not nearly so common as the name implies. There are people who, as we say, always "put their foot in it." Even if they do the right thing, they do it in the wrong way or at the wrong time. They mar whatever they attempt by overdoing it. How frequently a public speaker spoils an excellent speech by saying some unnecessary things! He weakens what he insists upon by insisting upon too much. Essentials and non-essentials seem to have equal prominence in his mind. He "slops over." He loses his balance, and is carried into some extravagances of statement which cause him to be less esteemed than he otherwise would be.

Such persons fail to see things in their proper relations. They may be learned and sympathetic, but they lack practical wisdom, which, as Arthur Helps says, "acts in the mind as gravitation does in the material world, combining, keeping things in their places, and maintaining a mutual dependence amongst the various parts of the system."

There was good old Bronson Alcott, for example, who had both a soaring intellect and a tender heart, who was always full of great schemes for the advancement of the human race, but, as a recent writer says, "Alas for his family! He would sit on his piazza expounding to visitors his plan for the emancipation of women, while his wife was tugging a pail of water from the distant spring as a step toward providing dinner for the host and his guests." There was a lamentable lack here of perception of the eternal fitness of things.

Some philosophers like Locke hold that sound sense, the perception of the fitness of things, is not acquirable, but must be born in a man. With this opinion Dr. Witherspoon, at one time president of Princeton College, would seem to agree, for he was wont to say to incoming classes of students:

"Gentlemen, if you have not learning this university is the fountain; if you have not piety the grace of God will give you that; but if you are wanting in common sense, may heaven have mercy on you."

(2) As common sense is the balance wheel in practical life, so conscience is the balance wheel in the moral life. Conscience is that power in us by which we discern the moral qualities of actions. It warns us before we do wrong, remonstrates with us while we are doing wrong, and fills us with selfreproach after we have done wrong. If, for example, a chance to enrich myself in some crooked way is presented to me, conscience at once warns me that it is wrong to cheat, makes me feel that I ought not to cheat, then, if in spite of its warnings, I go on and do the wrong, it chides me and fills me with a sense of guilt and shame.

Without a conscience man is like a machine without a regulator, sometimes too fast, sometimes too slow, seldom just right. Amid the innumerable variety of actions, choices, impulses, feelings, likings, habits, and passions, which are possible to man, conscience is the natural regulator and monarch. It presides over them all, and subjects all to its jurisdiction. We may not obey its behests, but we cannot silence its reproaches.

Do nothing against conscience. To disobey it is to destroy the peace and equipoise of your inner life. An approving conscience is a priceless treasure. It is really the smile of God. What conscience indorses God indorses. What conscience condemns God condemns.

Conscience is prophetic of a future life and of our accountability there for the deeds done in the body. Were this life all, conscience would be an incumbrance. We should be overfreighted for the voyage of life. A canal boat has no need of a compass. A compass argues deep sea sailing. A conscience argues eternity beyond the river of time. He who lives by conscience lives for two worlds. He who lives for this world only needs a balance wheel. We should call a man who could sit on a barrel of gunpowder smoking a pipe, a rather unbalanced sort of man; so is the man who lives in this world thoughtless of the next.

The Use and Power of Faith.

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REV. LEWIS O. BRASTOW, D.D., Yale University.

UR conception of the value of faith will depend upon our conception of its significance. Let us therefore at the outset understand what is meant by it.

In theological discussions faith has often been made synonymous with belief. But faith is surely more than belief. Belief is pre-supposed, but the two are not identical. Faith is the larger word. Faith may include belief, but belief does not as a necessity include faith. Belief is a response and a committal of the mind to an object that is recognized as real or true. Faith is a response and a committal of the entire inner self to an object that is recognized as good. It involves a docile and believing attitude of mind, but it includes also a certain responsiveness of feeling and of conviction and a concurrence of will. In such attitude of self-responsiveness and act of self-committal, faith always recognizes its object as good. It may attribute to its object a good that does not belong to it. That is, knowledge of the object may be defective. But faith always attaches itself to what it conceives to be good. No one trusts what he recog nizes as bad. All genuine faith therefore has a certain ethical significance. It is the object of faith that conditions the nature and scope of such ethical significance. The object may possibly be one's self. There is a reasonable and a worthy self-trust. If it be normal, that is, if it be neither too large nor too small, neither too arrogant nor too degrading, neither the self-assertion of pride nor the self-depreciation of conscious self-degradation, it is right and good. Every man should be able to believe

in and trust himself. Entire self-distrust is irrational and immoral. God put strength into manhood and meant that it should be an object of confidence. No one can fight successfully the battle of life otherwise. To distrust one's self in an emergency is to invite defeat. A habit of self-distrust undermines strength. It is never safe to suspend one's self in the uncertainty of self-distrust. A reasonable, well balanced selftrust, held within the limits of a dependent life, is moral. The object may be one's fellow men. No man can stand alone. The world crushes the one who attempts it. It is the necessity of life to believe in and trust one's fellows. It may often prove a misplaced confidence. In so far as it is, it may be irrational and morally defective. But faith cannot be called irrational, in so far as the necessity for it is given in the constitution of the human soul, and in the ordering of human life. To claim that faith, exercised in entire independence of the demonstrations of reason, is irrational, is to impeach the rationality of life itself. Faith in man is rational and it is moral.

The object may be the world in which we live. It is an instinct of faith that impels us to assume the order of the world, and to commit ourselves to it. The world was made to be an object of confidence and we are set over against it with a faithcapacity corresponding, by virtue of which it becomes a constitutional necessity to intrust one's self to it. When this confidence in the world becomes an intelligent self-committal to it, as involving a moral order, it enters the ethical domain. It may thus possibly attain even a religious significance. All sound faith in self, faith in fellow men, faith in the order of the world, may possibly involve a latent or implicit faith in a higher power above all, which is more and other than all, in whom centers the life of man and the constitution of the world. Certain it is that when we bring this question into consciousness, and begin to think rationally and morally, we are obliged to postulate the reality of God as the basis of all rational confidence in the reality and significance of the universe. It is faith as related to this higher object, faith, therefore, not in its technical and theo