Slowly and gradually is it that the individual mind, distracted and vacillating between God and a divine faith on the one hand, and a higher, or even the highest, science on the other, advances in its progress toward the perfect truth. Arriving, step by step, at fuller and better convictions, it attains at last to a clear discernment that, properly and fundamentally, these two apparently-conflicting objects are not distinct, but in their inmost essence are perfectly one. But for the final attainment of this end, the most important condition to be observed is that scientific patience to which I called your attention in the last Lecture. The chief thing to be guarded against is a precipitate and over-hasty decision. For by such we should incur the great danger of sacrificing the sacred deposit of faith to science, or of foolishly rejecting the treasures of true science, which as such is indispensable to the higher life, and even necessary and useful for the confirmation of faith itself. And why, in the pursuit of truth--that proper spiritual theme and highly interesting matter of the otherwise flat and insipid drama of life--should we feel indisposed to such a scientific patience, as I called it? Why should we be unwilling to recognize it as what it really is--both salutary and indispensable to human frailty, and, as an intellectual virtue, no less necessary than even moral patience? And the latter is even the fundamental condition of every great or little business, and almost every pursuit of life, if it is to attain to a happy result, and is not to fail of its true end and aim. For patience is, as it were, the indispensable portion which their earthly existence brings to all men. Not only is it needed by the invalid on the bed of sickness, in the long and tedious observance of his physician's precise and rigid prescriptions--not only is it wanted by the teacher in his troublesome task of giving the first development to the intellectual powers of the child--not only is patience requisite for the judge who has to settle the complicated quarrel of two litigants, of whom each claims his sympathy, each desires to win him to his own side and to bias his judgment--but it is also indispensable to the warrior whom ambition hurries forward in the pursuit of honor for himself and his country. For numberless are the hardships and privations, and many, too, are the miseries which the soldier must undergo before he can gain the object of his hopes, the hard-fought battle and the glorious victory. The statesman, too, with his wide sphere of influence and authority, stands eminently in need of patience. How watchful and comprehensive must be his vigilance, how deliberate his precautions, lest the organic course of his administration should come to a check or stop, in consequence of his having neglected, or failed to provide for any single member of the great body, or any regulating-wheel in the complicated machinery of the state.