HOURS OF THOUGHT. I. The Spirit of Trust. PSALM CXii. 7. "He shall not be afraid of evil tidings: his heart is fixed, trusting in the Lord." Trust is the belief of another's goodness on the inspiration of your own.) The moment you ask for other grounds than this, and withhold your reliance till it can rest upon external proof, you cease to trust, and stipulate for knowledge. On the other hand, if the confiding temper is so dominant as to blind you to opposing evidence and refuse the correction of positive experience, it becomes a weak credulity. In both extremes the pure soul breaks with the clear intellect; becoming its slave in the one case, and its tyrant in the other. The genuine sphere of trust is found in neutral instances, where outward proof is absent or VOL. II. B in equipoise, and the presumptions of right affection have the undisputed field to themselves. And even then, it is not a mere arbitrary hypothesis, pleasantly flung across the gap of ignorance to veil it with a curtain of painted cloud; not a mere willingness to live in a happy delusion till the rough winds of reality shall dissipate it; but rather, the quick instinct by •which the pure heart recognises purity, and love catches •the eye of love. So that, in its true exercise, trust is the intuitive apprehension of another's goodness by the sympathetic affinities of your own. (So This temper of the soul then is something quite different from knowledge; lying beneath it; going beyond it. Lying beneath it,-because, until we trust, we can never know, and the coloured glass of our predisposition will fling its hue on what we see. Going beyond it, because, where we cease to know, we cannot cease to judge; and far out in the region of the invisible and the future, where certain perception cannot reach, there are many things which the mind must fill in from its own resources of loving wisdom or suspicious folly. Nor is this exercise of simple reliance peculiar to matters of affection and religion. Reason itself, in all its applications, must take the greatest things for granted, in order to learn the least. You cannot refer the smallest object to its place, cannot trace the summer cloud or shooting star, without believing an immensity around its track. You cannot |