There are innumerable illustrations of this strange anomaly of the religious mind on the defensive against materialistic intrusions, lest it, too, become subverted and betrayed. The problem has to be solved individually, if solved at all, although the problem itself is universal. Every problem is, of necessity, the formulation in known terms of apparently unrelated factors, but its solution requires the reconciliation of all the factors, the reduction of hitherto meaningless combinations to intelligible order. When one examines critically his own understanding, and, consequently, his conduct, he is generally amazed by the extent of inconsistency that his life reveals. All these words and many more of allied nature represent inconsistencies in the use of his own powers, faculties, instruments.
Darkness brings to the child the extinction of all that it knows, of all on which it has relied.
The child in the dark is alone, left to itself, having to feel its way. So, of the materialist one may say truly that he is as a blind man in the light of faith, and of the simple believer that he is a child feeling his way in the world spiritual. Human vision can be directed toward the horizon we call birth or toward the horizon we call death. In the one case there is the gradual extinction of the light of memory, in the other of the light of imagination. Out of this secondhand material the average man constructs or adopts the mental and moral position of either spiritualism or materialism.