Lux Mundi

I Faith

Henry Scott Holland

I. In proposing to consider the origin and growth of faith, we have a practical, and not a merely theoretical, aim. We are thinking of the actual problems which are, at this moment, encompassing and hindering faith: and it is because of their urgency and their pressure, that we find it worth while to go back upon our earliest beginnings, in order to ask what Faith itself means. For only through an examination of its nature, its origin, and its structure, will it be possible for us to sift the questions which beset us, and to distinguish those to which Faith is bound to give an answer from those which it can afford to let alone.

We set out then on our quest, in the mind of those who have felt the trouble that is in the air. Even if we ourselves be not of their number, yet we all suffer from their hesitation: we all feel the imparted chill of their anxieties. For we are of one family: and the sickness, or depression of some, must affect the whole body. All of us, even the most confident, are interested in the case of those who are fearing for themselves, as they sadly search their own hearts, and ask, ‘What is it to believe? Do I know what it is to believe? Have I, or have I not, that which can be called “faith”? How can I be sure? What can I say of myself?’ Such questions as these are haunting and harassing many among us who find themselves facing the Catholic Creed, with its ring of undaunted assurance, with its unhesitating claim to unique and universal supremacy, and contrast with this their own faint and tentative apprehension of the strong truths, which are so confidently asserted. Such men and women are anxious and eager to number themselves among those that believe: but can they call this temper ‘belief,’ which is so far below the level of the genuine response which those Creeds obviously expect? Where is the blitheness of faith? Where is its unshaken conviction? Where is its invincible simplicity? Why is it that they only succeed in moving forward with such painful indecision?

Now, it is to this temper that this essay is addressed. It does not aim at convicting a hostile disbelief, but at succouring a distressed faith. And this it does under the conviction that, in so doing, it is responding to the peculiar character and needs of the situation.

For the urgency, the peril of the hour, lies, not so much in the novelty, or force, of the pressure that is brought to bear against faith, as in the behaviour of faith itself under the pressure. What has happened is, not that faith has been confounded, but that it has been challenged. It has been challenged by new social needs, by strange developments of civilisation, by hungers that it had not yet taken into account, by thirsts that it had not prepared itself to satisfy. It has been challenged by new scientific methods, wholly unlike its familiar intellectual equipment; by new worlds of facts opened to its astonishment through discoveries which have changed the entire look of the earth; by immense masses of novel material, which it has been suddenly and violently required to assimilate; by strange fashions of speech in science and history; by a babel of ‘unknown tongues’ in all departments of learning and literature.

Faith is under the pressure of this challenge: and the primary question is, how will it behave? What is it going to say, or do, in face of this exciting transformation which has passed over the entire surface of our intellectual scenery? How will it deal with the situation? Will it prove itself adequate to the crisis? To what extent can it afford to submit to the transforming process which has already operated upon the mind and the imagination? If it submit, can it survive? And in what condition? with what loss, or damage, or change? On every side these challenges reach it; they beat at its doors; they arrive in pelting haste; they clamour for immediate solutions.

Now faith, under these rapid and stormy challenges, is apt to fall into panic. For this, surely, is the very meaning of a panic—a fear that feeds upon itself. Men in a panic are frightened at finding themselves afraid. So now with faith; it is terrified at its own alarm. How is it (it asks itself) that it should find itself baffled and timorous? If faith were faith, would it ever lose its confidence? To be frightened is to confess itself false: for faith is confidence in God, Who can never fail. How can faith allow of doubt or hesitation? Surely for faith to hesitate, to be confused, is to deny its very nature. Thus many anxious and perplexed souls retreat before their own perplexities. Because their faith is troubled, they distrust and abandon their faith. The very fact that it is in distress becomes an argument against it.

It is at this point, and because of this particular peril that we are urgently required to consider very seriously the nature and conditions of faith. For our panic arises from our assumption that faith is of such a nature, that the perplexity, into which, now and again, we find ourselves thrown, must be impossible to it, must be incompatible with it. Now, is this so? Ought we to expect of faith that its confidence should never fail it—that its light should be always decisive? Is faith incriminated by the mere fact that it is in difficulties?

Let us, first, consider what has occurred. Perhaps the situation itself, if we quietly review it, will give a reason why it is that, just at the moment when we most need vigour and assurance, we should find ourselves stripped of all that tends to reassure.

For the peculiarity of the disturbance which we have got to encounter lies in this, that it has removed from us the very weapons by which we might hope to encounter it. Faith’s evidential material is all corroborative and accumulative; it draws it from out of an external world, which can never wholly justify, or account for the internal reality, yet which can so group itself, that from a hundred differing lines, it offers indirect and parenthetic and convergent witness of that which is, itself, beyond the reach of external proof. It is this gradual grouping of an outer life into that assorted perspective in which it offers the most effective corroboration of the inner truth, which faith slowly accomplishes upon the matter which human science presents to it. When once the grouping is achieved, so that the outer world, known under certain scientific principles, tallies harmoniously with its inner convictions, faith feels secure. The external life offers it pictures, analogies, metaphors—all echoing and repeating the internal world. Faith beholds itself mirrored: and, so echoed, so mirrored, it feels itself in possession of corroborating evidences. But the present scientific confusion seems to have shattered the mirror—to have broken up the perspective—to have dissolved the well-known groupings. It is true, as some of the essays which follow will try to show, that the convulsion of which we speak, lies, chiefly, in a change of position, or of level; so that great masses of the matter, now thrown into confusion, will be found to compose themselves afresh, under the newer conditions of review, and will appear again as part and parcel of the scientific scenery. It is a change of perspective more than anything else. But, no doubt, such a change is just of the character to upset us, to disturb us; for, during the change, while shifting from the old position to the new, we are in the very chaos of confusion; everything seems, for the moment, to be tumbling about around us: the entire scene grows unsteady; though, indeed, when once we have got our feet firmly placed at the new level of vantage, much, that once was familiar, is discovered to be back again in its place, looking much the same as of old. It is the first shock of this enforced transition which is so calculated to terrify: as when, for instance, men see their habitual reliance on the evidence for design in nature, which had been inherited from Paley, yield, and vanish, under the review of the facts with which the theory of evolution acquaints them. What they feel is, that their familiar mode of interpreting their faith, of justifying it, of picturing it, has abruptly been torn from them. That which once seemed to evidence it in the outer world, has ceased to be accepted or trusted. The habitual ways of argument, the accepted assumptions, which they had hitherto used as their supports and their instruments—have been withdrawn—have become obsolete. Faith is thrown back on itself, on its own inherent, naked vitality; it is robbed for the moment of that sense of solidity and security, which fortifies and refreshes it, when the outer world of natural facts, and the inner world of intellect and fancy, all corroborate its confidence in itself, by harmonious attestations of its validity. The old world of things had been brought into this adaptation with the principles of belief. Faith was at home in it, and looked out over it with cheerfulness, and moved about it with freedom. But that old world is gone; and the new still lies untested, unsorted, unverified, unassimilated, unhandled. It looks foreign, odd, remote. Faith finds no obvious corroborations in it: there, where it used to feel buttressed and warm, it now feels chilly and exposed53.

This is the first consequence, and it is serious enough in itself to provoke alarm. Faith cannot be at ease or confident, until the outer world responds to its own convictions; and yet ease and confidence are exactly what it is challenged to exhibit.

And then, when a man, under this sense of fear, deprived of external testimonies, attempts to exhibit, to evoke, to examine, his inner conviction, in its inherent and vital character, as it is in itself, unsupported by adventitious aids, he is astonished at his own difficulty in discovering or disclosing it. Where is it all fled—that which he had called his faith? He had enjoyed it, had relied on it, had again and again asserted it in word and deed: and now, when he wants to look at it, when he is summoned to produce it, when he is challenged to declare its form and fashion; he finds himself dazed, bewildered, searching helplessly for that which ever escapes him, grasping at a fleeting shadow, which baffles his efforts to endow it with fixity and substance. And, so finding, he grows yet more desperately alarmed: it seems to him that he has been self-deceived, betrayed, abandoned. He is bitterly sensitive to the sharp contrast between the triumphant solidity with which scientific facts bear down upon him, certified, undeniable, substantial, and the vague, shifty, indistinct phantom, into which his conviction vanishes as soon as he attempts to observe it in itself, or draw it out for public inspection.

Yet, if we consider what faith signifies, we shall see at once that this contrast ought to carry with it no alarm. It is a contrast which follows on the very nature of faith. If we had understood its nature, we could never have expected it to disclose itself under the same conditions as those which govern the observation of scientific facts. Faith is an elemental energy of the soul, and the surprise that we are undergoing at not being able to bring it under direct observation, is only an echo of the familiar shock with which we learn that science has ransacked the entire bodily fabric of man, and has nowhere come across his soul; or has searched the heavens through and through with its telescope, and has seen no God. We are upset for a moment when first we hear this; and then, we recover ourselves as we recollect that, if God be what we believe Him to be, immaterial and spiritual, then He would cease to be Himself, if He were visible through a telescope: and that if the spirit of man be what we believe it to be, that is the very reason why no surgeon’s knife can ever arrive at it.

And, as with the soul, so with all its inherent and essential acts. They are what it is: they can no more be visible than it can. How can any of the basal intuitions, on which our knowledge rests, present themselves to our inspection in the guise of external and phenomenal facts? That which observes can never, strictly speaking, observe itself. It can never look on at itself from outside, or view itself as one among the multitude of things that come under its review. How can it? It is itself the organ of vision: and the eye cannot see its own power of seeing. This is why natural science, which is an organised system of observation, finds that its own observing mind is absolutely and totally outside its ken. It can take stock of the physiological condition of thoughts or of feelings; but they themselves, in their actual reality, are all rigidly shut out from the entire area of scientific research. Wherever they begin, it ends; its methods abruptly fail. It possesses no instrument by which to make good its advance further. For the only instrument which it knows how to use, and by which alone it can search, and examine, is itself the object which it desires to submit to examination. But if it is to be examined, who, and what, is to conduct the examination? The observing mind that turns round to explore itself, carries itself round as it turns. It can never say—‘Let me look at myself, as if I were a phenomenon, as a fact presented to my own consciousness,’ for it itself would be engaged in the act of looking: it itself is the consciousness to which it proposes to present itself54. So again, the thought itself can never hope, by rigid analysing, to arrive at last at itself, as the final residue of the analysis, for it is itself, all along, employed as analyst. The process of analysis is, itself, the real disclosure of what thought is: and this disclosure is made just as effectively even though the result of the analysis be to declare that it can discover nothing that corresponds to thought. It is, indeed, impossible that anything should so correspond, except the power to analyse; but this power is thought: and every act of the analysis, which issues in the sceptical conclusion, has verified the real existence of thought. It is the same with all profound spiritual acts. None of them can ever be offered to public inspection: they can never be handed across to another, for him to look at. For they are living acts, and not external results. How can an act of will, or of love, be submitted to observation? Its outward result is there to be examined; but it, itself, is incapable of transportation. If anyone were to ask ‘What is it you mean by thinking, or loving, or willing?’ who could tell him? It would be obviously impossible to explain, except to a being who could think, will, and love. You could give him illustrations of what you mean—signs—instances—evidences; but they can only be intelligible, as evidences, to one who already possesses the faculties. No one can do a piece of thinking for another, and hand it over to him in a parcel. Only by thinking, can it be known what thought is: only by feeling can it be understood what is meant by a feeling: only by seeing, willing, loving, can we have the least conception of sight, or of will, or of love.

And faith stands with these primary intuitions. It is deeper and more elemental than them all: and, therefore, still less than they can it admit of translation into other conditions than its own;—can still less submit itself to public observation. It can never be looked at from without. It can be known only from within itself. Belief is only intelligible by believing. Just as a man who is asked to say what love is, apart from all its outward manifestations and results, must be driven back on the iteration—‘Love is—what love is: everyone who loves, knows; no one who does not love, can ever know;’ just as a man, who is challenged to describe and define his feelings or his desires, when stripped of all the outward evidences that they can possibly give of themselves, is thrown into inarticulate bewilderment, and can give no intelligible answer, and can fashion to himself no distinct feature or character, and can only assert, confusedly, that he feels what he feels, and that to desire is to desire;—so with faith. The scientific convulsion has shaken and confused its normal modes of self-interpretation, its usual evidences, signs, illustrations: these outer aids at definition, by metaphor or by corroboration, are all brought under dim eclipse for the moment: their relative values have been thrown into uncertainty: they are undergoing temporary displacement, and no one is quite sure which is being shifted, and which can be trusted to stand firm. Faith, robbed of its habitual aids to expression, is summoned to show itself on the field, in its own inner character. And this is just what it never can or may do. It can only reiterate, in response to the demand for definition, ‘Faith is faith.’ ‘Believing is—just believing.’ Why, then, let ourselves be distressed, or bewildered, by finding ourselves reduced to this impotence of explanation? Far from it being an incrimination of our faith, to find ourselves caught in such a difficulty of utterance, it is just what must happen if faith be a profound and radical act of the inner soul. It is, essentially, an active principle, a source of energy, a spring of movement: and, as such, its verification can never take place through passive introspection. It verifies itself only in actions: its reality can only be made evident through experience of its living work.

II. We may, then, free ourselves from the sinister suspicions which belong to panic. It is not the superficiality of our faith, which is the secret of our bewilderment, but its depth. The deepest and most radical elements of our being are, necessarily, the hardest to unearth. They are, obviously, the most remote from the surface of our lives: they are the rarest to show themselves in the open daylight: they require the severest effort to disentangle their identity: they lie below all ordinary methods of utterance and expression; they can only be discovered through careful recognition of the secret assumptions which are involved in the acts and words which they habitually produce. By these acts and words their existence and their force is suggested, but not exhausted—manifested, but not accounted for. These form our only positive interpretation and evidence: and such evidence must, therefore, always remain inadequate, imperfect; we have always and inevitably to go behind it, and beyond it, in order to reach and touch the motive-energy which is disclosed to us through it. No wonder that we find this far from an easy matter. No wonder that, under the pressure of a hostile challenge, we often lose ourselves in a confused babble, as we struggle to make plain to others, or even to ourselves, these innermost convictions of our souls.

Indeed, such things can never be made plain: no one ought to expect that they should. For, if we think of it, the primary acts of spirit must be the last things that can ever be made plain; for the entire life issuing from them is their only interpretation, so that only when that life is closed, can their interpretation be complete. And here, in faith, we are at the root of a life which, as we believe, it will take eternity to fulfil. And, if so, only in and through eternity can its full evidence for itself be produced, or its right interpretation be yielded.

Surely, this truth clears us from many clamorous demands, which ask of us an impossible verification. For if once we saw that we were employed in verifying the nature of that which, if it be real, can, confessedly, present us, on this side of the grave, only with the most fragmentary evidence of its character, we should put lightly aside the taunting challenge to produce such proof of our motive principle as will stand comparison with the adequate and precise evidences of a scientific fact, or which will submit to the rigid tests of a legal examination. If faith be faith, it could not, for that very reason, fulfil the conditions so proposed to it. These legal and scientific conditions are laboriously and artificially limited to testing the presence of a motive, or a force, which must be assumed to exist under fixed, precise, complete conditions, here and now. They pre-suppose that, for all practical purposes, its quantity cannot vary, or fluctuate. If it be present at all, it is present in a distinct and formal manner, open to definite measurement, expressing itself in unalterable characteristics. The entire consideration of its activity is strictly confined to the normal horizon of the actual world of present existence. These assumptions are the first necessity of all forms of science, without making which, it could not even begin. They are the conditions of all its success. But they are also its limitations: and as such, they most certainly exclude from their survey, anything that professes to exist after the manner of faith. For what is faith? It is no steady force, existing under certified and unvarying conditions which receive their final determination in the world about us. Faith is, while it is here on earth, only a tentative probation: it is a struggling and fluctuating effort in man to win for himself a valid hold upon things that exist under the conditions of eternity. In faith, we watch the early and rude beginnings, amid an environment that but faintly and doubtfully responds to it, of a power still in the womb—still unborn into its true sphere—still enveloped in dark wrappings which encumber and impede. We see here but its blind, uncertain pushings, its hesitating moves, now forward, now back, now strangely vigorous and assertive, and then again, as strangely weak and retreating. Its significance, its interpretation, its future possibilities, its secret of development—all these lie elsewhere, beyond death, beyond vision: we can but dimly guess, from its action here, what powers feed it, on what resources it can rely, what capacity of growth is open to it, what final issue determines the measure and value of its efforts and achievements here. Such a force as this is bound to upset all our ablest calculations. We can never lay down rules to govern and predict its capabilities. It will disappoint every conceivable test that we can devise for fixing its conditions. It will laugh at our attempts to circumscribe its action. Where we look for it to be weak, it will suddenly show itself strong: when we are convinced that we may expect a vigorous display of its capacities, it will mysteriously lapse. All this may terribly disconcert us. It may tempt us into angry declarations that such an incalculable existence is unworthy of scientific attention—is fanciful, is unreal. But the only lesson which we ought to learn is that methods adapted for one state of things are bound to prove themselves futile when applied to another. If we are employed in observing a life, which has its ground and its end in a world beyond the present, then all methods framed for the express and definite purpose of examining life as it exists here and now, will necessarily prove themselves ludicrously inapt. The futility, the barrenness, the ineptitude of our researches, lies, not with the faith against which we level our irritable complaints, but with the methods which, by their very terms of definition, proclaim themselves to be misplaced.

Where, then, must we dig to unearth the roots of faith? What are the conditions of its rise and exercise? Wherein lie its grounds, and the justification of its claim?

Faith grounds itself, solely and wholly, on an inner and vital relation of the soul to its source. This source is most certainly elsewhere; it is not within the compass of the soul’s own activity. In some mode, inconceivable and mysterious, our life issues out of an impenetrable background: and as our life includes spiritual elements, that background has spiritual factors: and as our life is personal, within that background exists personality. This supply of life in which we begin, from out of which our being opens, can never cease, so long as we exist, to sustain us by one continuous act. Ever its resources flow in: ever its vital support is unwithdrawn. In some fashion or other, we all know that this must be so: and the Christian Creed only lifts into clear daylight, and endows with perfect expression, this elementary and universal verity, when it asserts that at the very core of each man’s being lies, and lives, and moves, and works, the creative energy of the Divine Will—‘the Will of our Father Which is in Heaven.’

We stand, by the necessities of our existence, in the relationship of sons to a Father, Who has poured out into us, and still pours, the vigour of His own life. This is the one basis of all faith. Unless this relationship actually exists, there could be no faith: if it exists, then faith is its essential corollary: it is bound to appear. Our faith is simply the witness to this inner bond of being. That bond, which is the secret of our entire existence, accounting for all that we are, or do, or feel, or think, or say, must become capable of recognition by a being that is, in any sense, free, intelligent, conscious: and this recognition by us of the source from whence we derive, is what we mean by faith. Faith is the sense in us that we are Another’s creature, Another’s making. Even as we not only feel, but feel that we feel; not only think, but know that we think; not only choose, but determine to choose: so, below and within all our willing, and thinking, and feeling, we are conscious of Another, whose mind and will alone make possible both the feeling that we feel, and also the capacity to feel it; both the thought that we think, and also the capacity to know it; both the will that we put forth, as well as the power to determine it. Every act, every desire, every motive of ours, is dependant on the source out of sight: we hang on Another’s will; we are alive in Another’s life. All our life is a discovery, a disclosure, of this secret. We find it out only by living. As we put out powers that seem to be our own, still even in and by the very act of putting them out, we reveal them to be not our own; we discover that we are always drawing on unseen resources. We are sons: that is the root-law of our entire self. And faith is the active instinct of that inner sonship: it is the point at which that essential sonship emerges into consciousness; it is the disclosure to the self of its own vital secret; it is the thrill of our inherent childhood, as it makes itself felt within the central recesses of the life; it is the flame that shoots into consciousness at the recognition of the touch of our divine fatherhood; it is the immediate response of the sonship in us to its discovered origin.

Faith, then, is an instinct of relationship based on an inner actual fact. And its entire office and use lies in realising the secret fact. For the bond is spiritual; and it can only realise itself in a spirit that has become aware of its own laws. No blind animal acceptance of the divine assistance can draw out the powers of this sonship. The reception of the assistance must itself be conscious, loving, intelligent, willing. The natural world can receive its full capacities from God without recognition of the source whence they flow in: but this absence of living recognition forbids it ever to surpass those fixed limits of development which we name ‘natural.’ But a creature of God that could not only receive but recognise that it received, would, by that very recognition, lay itself open to an entirely novel development; it would be susceptible of infinitely higher influences shed down upon it from God; it would admit far finer and richer inpourings of divine succours; it would be fed, not only from underground channels as it were, but by fresh inlets which its consciousness of its adherence in God would uncover and set in motion. The action of God upon His creatures would be raised to a new level of possibility: for a living and intelligent will has capacities of receptivity, which were altogether excluded so long as God merely gave, and the creature blindly and dumbly took. Faith, then, opens an entirely new career for creaturely existence; and the novelty of this career is expressed in the word ‘supernatural.’ The ‘supernatural’ world opens upon us as soon as faith is in being55.

And this career, it will be seen, is markedly distinct from the natural in this—that it is capable of ever advancing expansion. All natural things, which blindly accept their life from God, must, perforce, have a decreed and certified development, limited by the conditions in which they are found existing. Their receptivity is a fixed quantity, determined by the character imposed upon them at creation, and bound to come to an abrupt arrest at some precise point56. But receptivity through conscious recognition is open to a development of which it is impossible for us to fix the limits. For this living recognition itself advances in its capacity to see and understand. Every act by which it recognises the Giver in the gifts, heightens and intensifies its power to recognise Him; and every increase of its power to recognise Him increases also its capacity to receive; and this increase will again react on the faculties of recognition. A vision opens out of spiritual growth, in which every step forward made through incoming grace, makes a new step possible, finds a fresh grace ever waiting to crown its latest gift with ever new endowment. The sonship that is at work underground in man, below the level of consciousness, at the hidden base of faith, is one that holds in it capacities which can only be evoked under the appeals of a living and voluntary faith. Faith is the discovery of an inherent sonship, which, though already sealed to it, already in action, nevertheless cannot but withhold its more rich and splendid energies until this discovery is made; and which discloses them only according to the progressive clearness and force with which the process of discovery advances. The history of faith is the history of this gradual disclosure, this growing capacity to recognise and receive, until the rudimentary omen of God’s fatherhood in the rudest savage who draws, by clumsy fetich, or weird incantation, upon a power outside himself, closes its long story in the absolute recognition, the perfect and entire receptivity, of that Son of man, who can do nothing of Himself, ‘but what He seeth the Father do,’ and, for that very reason, can do everything: for whatsoever ‘the Father doeth, the Son doeth also.’

Faith, then, is not only the recognition by man of the secret source of his being, but it is itself, also, the condition under which the powers, that issue from that source, make their arrival within him. The sonship, already germinal, completes itself, realises itself in man, through his faith. Not only is the unconscious human nature held by attachment to the Father who feeds it with hidden succours, but faith is, itself, the power by which the conscious life attaches itself to God; it is an apprehensive motion of the living spirit, by which it intensifies its touch on God; it is an instinct of surrender, by which it gives itself to the fuller handling of God: it is an affection of the will, by which it presses up against God, and drinks in divine vitality with quickened receptivity57.

What then will be its characteristics? We have only to keep close to the conception of sonship, and we shall understand them well enough. Faith is the attitude, the temper, of a son towards a father. That is a relationship that we all can understand for ourselves. We know it, in spite of all the base and cruel corruptions under which, in the homes of man, its beauty lies disfigured. Still, beneath disguises, we catch sight, in rare and happy conditions, of that beautiful intimacy which can spring up between a son and a father, where love is one with reverence, and duty fulfils itself in joy. Such a sonship is like a spiritual instinct, which renders intelligible to the son every mood and gesture of the father. His very blood moves in rhythm to the father’s motives. His soul hangs, for guidance, on the father’s eyes: to him, each motive of the father justifies itself as a satisfying inspiration. The father’s will is felt deliciously encompassing him about; enclosed within it, his own will works, glad and free in its fortifying obedience. Such a relationship as this needs no justifying sanction beyond itself: it is its own sanction, its own authority, its own justification. ‘He is my father’: that is a sufficient reason for all this sympathetic response to another’s desire. ‘I am his son’: that is the final premiss in which all argument comes to a close. The willing surrender of the heart is the witness to a fact which is beyond argument, which accepts no denial, yet which is no tyrannous fate, but is a living and animating bond of blood, which it is a joy to recognise, and an inspiration to confess.

It is in such a spirit of sonship that faith reveals and realises itself. Faith is that temper of sympathetic and immediate response to Another’s will which belongs to a recognised relationship of vital communion. It is the spirit of confident surrender, which can only be justified by an inner identification of life. Its primary note, therefore, will be trust—that trust of Another, which needs no ulterior grounds on which to base itself, beyond what is involved in the inherent law of this life. Faith will ever discover, when its reason for action, or belief, are traced to their last source, that it arrives at a point where its only and all-sufficient plea will be ‘God is my Father: I am His child.’ That relationship is its root; on the top of that relationship faith works; as a witness to that relationship, it puts forth all the spiritual temper which, of necessity, follows on this intimacy of contact.

And, here, we find ourselves in the presence of the law by which faith claims to be universal. Unless this inner relationship be a fact, faith could not account for itself: but if it be a fact, it must constitute a fixed and necessary demand upon all men. All are, equally, ‘children of God’: and the answer to the question ‘Why should I believe?’ must be, for ever and for all, valid; ‘because you are a child of God.’ Faith is nothing but the spiritual temper and attitude, which belong, inherently, to such a fact. No one can escape from such a claim: for his existence constitutes the claim. If he be a child, it must be demanded, of him, that he should display the characteristics of his childhood: the father must, of necessity, be concerned with the question of his own recognition by his son. Our manhood lies in this essential sonship: and, if so, then to be without faith, without the conscious realisation of the sonship, is to be without the fulness of a man’s proper nature. It is to be inhuman: to be curtailed of the natural development: to be maimed and thwarted. It means that the vital outcome of the inner verity has been arrested; that the sensitive perceptions have been blunted and stunted; that the sonship in us has, somehow, lost touch with its true fatherhood.

We learn at once, as we consider this, the interpretation of that two-sided character, which surprises us in God’s dealings with men:—i.e. the imperative rigour of His stated requirements, coupled with His wide and patient tolerance, in actual fact.

As a Father of all, He cannot, conceivably, be satisfied with anything short of complete recognition by His children. He must look for faith; He must require it of them all: He must leave no means untried by which to secure it: He must seek to win it at all costs: His love is inevitably and cruelly hindered, unless He can obtain it: and when He obtains it, He must passionately desire to establish, evoke, develope, perfect it: for each rise in faith is a rise in capacities of intercourse, of intimacy, between Father and son. We see how strenuous and zealous will be His efforts to build up faith in men: we understand how urgent, and pressing, and alarming will become His entreaties, His warnings, His menaces, His appeals, if faith is allowed to slide or fail. Loss of faith means a shattered home, a ruptured intimacy, a sundered love; it means that a Father must look on while the very nature He has made in His image shrivels and shrinks, and all hope of growth, of advancing familiarity, of increasing joy, of assured sympathy, is cut down and blighted. We all know the bitterness of a breach which scatters a family into fragments: and that is but a faint shadow of all which the great Father sees to be involved in the broken contact between Himself and His son. What standard have we by which to sound the abyss of divine disappointment, as God waits ready with gift upon gift of endless grace which He will pour out upon the child of His love, as the endless years open out new wonders of advancing intimacy; and lo! the channel by which alone the gifts can reach him, is choked and closed? Faith is the son’s receptivity: it is that temper of trust, which makes the entry of succours possible: it is the medium of response: it is the attitude of adherence to the Father, by virtue of which communications can pass. If faith goes, all further action of God upon the soul, all fresh arrival of power, is made impossible. The channel of intercourse is blocked.

The demand, then, for faith by God is bound to be exacting, and urgent, and universal. But, then, this demand holds in reserve a ground of hope, of patience, of tolerance, of charity, which we can, in no single instance, venture to limit. For the faith, which it rigorously asks for, reposes, as we see, on an inner and essential relationship, already existent, which knits man to his God. Not even the Fall, with all its consequent accumulations of sin, can avail to wholly undo this primitive condition of existence. The fatherhood of God still sustains its erring children; the divine image is blurred, but not blotted out. Still, at the close of the long days, our Lord can speak to the wondering men who flock about Him, of One Who is even now their Father in Heaven. This objective and imperishable relationship, the underlying ground of all our being, is the pre-supposition of all faith, without which it would itself be impossible. And, this being so, God can afford to wait very long for faith to show itself. So long as its primary condition is there, there is always hope. The stringent demand is not inspired by the mind of a lawgiver, nor pressed home with the austerity of a judge; it expresses the hunger of a father’s heart, to win the confidence and to evoke the capacities of the children of its love. Such a hunger is, indeed, more rigorous and exact than the letter of any law: it aspires after a more accurate correspondence; it is sensitive to more delicate distinctions: but, nevertheless, it holds, in its fatherliness, far wider capacities of toleration than lawgiver, or judge. That same heart of the father, which in its hunger of love is so exacting, will, out of the same hunger, never despair, and never forsake: it will never cease from the pursuit of that responsive trust which it desires; it will make allowances, it will permit delays, it will weave excuses, it will endure rebuffs, it will condescend to persuasion, it will forget all provocations, it will wait, it will plead, it will repeat its pleas, it will take no refusal, it will overleap all obstacles, it will run risks, it will endlessly and untiringly forgive, if only, at the last, the stubborn child-heart yield, and the tender response of faith be won.

Here, then, we seem to see why the nature of faith allows for two points which surprise us in God’s dealings, as if with a contradiction. On the one hand, we hear Him, though prophet and priest, insisting, with severe precision, on the necessity of a right and accurate faith. On the other, we cannot but recognise, in the open area of actual life, the evidences of a wide and almost boundless toleration. Again and again it must have seemed to us that the Church and the world gave, thus, antithetical evidence of God’s character. Yet, in truth, both speak the voice of one and the same God, Who, in His undivided love, both passionately seeks for the delicate and direct response of an accurate faith; and, also, in order not to lose this final joy, ‘suffereth long, and is kind, beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things.’ Yes!—has even to endure that men should pit His toleration against His love, and should argue that, because He will wait so long and quietly for the fruit that He desires to reap, therefore, He does not desire the fruit. In reality, the degree of the toleration, with which God will patiently wait for the fruits of faith, is the measure of the extremity of His desire for it. Just because He wants it so much, He waits so long.

III. If faith, then, be the witness and the exercise of our sonship in God, we can recognise at once the place it will hold among the other powers and capacities of our nature. We are so unfortunately apt to rank it as one among many faculties, and then to find ourselves engaged in agitating controversies concerning its limits and its claims. We have to secure for it, against the rest, a field for free dominion; and that field is hard to define; and rival powers beset it; and there are raids and skirmishes on every frontier; and reason is ever making violent incursions on the one side, and feeling is actively besieging it on the other: and the scientific frontiers, which we are ever on the point of fixing, shift, and change, and vanish, as soon as we determine them; and the whole force of Christian apologetics is spent in aimless and barren border-warfare.

But, if what we have been saying be true, the whole trouble turns on a mistake. Faith is not to be ranked by the side of the other faculties in a federation of rival powers, but is behind them all. It goes back to a deeper root; it springs from a more primitive and radical act of the central self than they. It belongs to that original spot of our being, where it adheres in God, and draws on divine resources. Out from that spot our powers divide, radiating into separate gifts,—will, memory, feeling, reason, imagination, affection; but all of them are but varying expressions of that essential sonship, which is their base. And all, therefore, run back into that home where faith abides, and works, and rises, and expands. At the root of all our capacities lies our sonship; at the root of all our conscious life lies faith, the witness of our sonship. By adherence in God, we put out our gifts, we exercise our functions, we develop our faculties; and faith, therefore, far from being their rival, whom they are interested in suspecting, and curbing, and confining within its limits, is the secret spring of their force, and the inspiration of their growth, and the assurance of their success. All our knowledge, for instance, relies upon our sonship; it starts with an act of faith58. We throw ourselves, with the confidence of children, upon an external world, which offers itself to our vision, to our touch, to our review, to our calculation, to our handling, to our use. Who can assure us of its reality, of its truth? We must measure it by those faculties under the manipulation of which it falls: but how can the faculties guarantee to us their own accuracy? How can we justify an extension of our own inner necessities to the world of outward things? How can we attribute to nature that rational and causative existence which we find ourselves forced to assume in it? Our justification, our confidence, all issue, in the last resort, from our sonship. Our powers have, in them, some likeness to those of God. If He be our Father, if we be made in His image, then, in our measure, we can rely upon it that we close with Nature in its reality; that our touch, our sight, our reason, have some hold on the actual life of things; that we see and know in some such manner, after our degree, as God Himself sees and knows. In unhesitating reliance upon our true sonship, we sally out and deal with the world; we act upon the sure conviction that we are not altogether outside the secret of objective existence. We refuse absolutely to doubt, or go behind the reports made to us by feeling, by memory, by thought. If once we are clear as to what the report is, we rest on it; we ask for no power to stand (as it were) outside our own experience, our own knowledge, so as to assure ourselves of their veracity. We are certain that our Father cannot have misguided us; that we are within His influence; that we are in modified possession of His truth; that our capacities reflect His mind. We could not have so confidently recognised, understood, and handled the world, if it had been wholly foreign to us. As it is, we lay instinctive hold upon it; we take spontaneous possession; we exert authority upon it; we feel our inherent right over it; we are at home in it; we move freely about it, as children in a father’s house. Acting in this faith, all our capacities justify themselves to us; they respond to our reliance upon them; they develop into ever advancing strength under the motions of this trust; they form a continual and increasing witness to the verity of that sonship in which we have believed.

Faith, then, belongs to our entire body of activities. We live by faith. By faith, under the inspiration of faith, we put out our life, we set to work, we exercise faculties, we close with our opportunities, we have confidence in our environment, we respond to calls, we handle critical emergencies, we send out far abroad our experimental intelligence, we discover, we accumulate experiences, we build, and plant, and develop. An elemental act of faith lies at the root of all this advance; and every motion that we make, demands a renewal of that primitive venture. In all secular progress ‘we walk by faith.’ Every step revives the demand. Just as the earth, if it necessitates the idea of a primal creation, requires, by exactly the same necessity, an incessant renewal of that first creative act, so our life, if it required faith to start it, requires faith every moment to sustain it. Our faculties never arrive at a use which is self-dependent and self-originated, as if they could grow beyond the tentative conditions of their earliest assays. They originate in a venturous experiment; and, however long, and however complicated that experiment become, it retains its original character; it remains experimental to the end. The results, no doubt, justify the venture made; but, then, the first venture involved such immense assumptions, that no results reached can ever complete its justification, and so remove its tentative nature. For, by assuming a real correspondence between our faculties and the world with which they deal, it assumed that such a correspondence would never fail us; would be capable of infinite verification; would prove adequate to all possible experiences; would receive indefinite and progressive extension. No verifications ever reached can, then, exhaust the faith of that primitive venture; they can only serve to exhibit to it how far more was contained within that venture than it could ever have conceived. New knowledge, new experience, far from expunging the elements of faith, make ever fresh demands upon it; they constitute perpetual appeals to it to enlarge its trust, to expand its original audacity. And yet the very vastness of those demands serves to obscure and conceal their true character. This is the key to much of our present bewilderment. The worlds of knowledge and of action have assumed such huge proportions, have accumulated such immense and complicated resources, have gained such supreme confidence in their own stability, have pushed forward their successes with such startling power and rapidity, that we have lost count of their primal assumption. In amazement at their stupendous range, we are over-awed; we dare not challenge them with their hypothetical origin, or remind them that their entire and wonderful structure is but an empty and hollow dream, unless they are prepared to place their uttermost trust in an unverified act of faith. Given that trust, which relies on the reality of the bond which holds between our inner faculties and the outer world, then all this marvellous vision is rooted on a rock, has validity and substance. Withdraw that spiritual trust in our sonship, and all this fairy-world, won for us by science and experience,

These cloud-capped towers, these gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like an unsubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind.

Our secular and scientific life is an immense experiment in faith,—an experiment which verifies itself by success, but which justifies itself only if it remembers to attribute all its success to the reality of that hidden relationship to God, which is the key to all its capacities, the justification of all its confidence, and the security of all its advance.

Such a remembrance is not easy for it: for the exercise of the capacities is instinctive and spontaneous, and it requires an effort of reflection to question the validity of such exercise. And such an effort seems tiresome and impertinent in the heat of successful progress, in the thick of crowding conquests. The practical man is apt to give an irritated stamp on the ground, which to him feels so solid, and to deem this a sufficient answer to the importunate inquiry how he knows that he has any substantial world to know and to handle. For faith lies behind our secular life, secreted within it: and the secular life, therefore, can go on as if no faith was wanted; it need not trouble its head with perplexing questions, whether its base be verifiable by the same standards and measures as its superstructure. Its own practical activity is complete and free, whether it discover its hidden principle or not: just as Mr. Jourdain’s conversation was complete and free, long before he discovered that he was talking prose. We have to stand outside our secular life and reflect on it, to disclose its true spring. The appeal to faith here is indirect.

But, in religion, this hidden activity is evoked by a direct appeal: it is unearthed; it is summoned to come forward on its own account. God demands of this secret and innermost vitality that it should no longer lie incased within the other capacities, but that it should throw off its sheltering covers, and should emerge into positive action, and should disclose its peculiar and native character. God, the Father, calls faith out of its dim background into the front of the scene. He does this under the pressure of invocations, which address their appeals through, and by means of, the secular and visible material, within and behind which He is ever at work. This had, indeed, always told of His invisible and eternal Godhead: but it did so indirectly, by requiring Him as its constant pre-supposition and base. Now, it is so used as to bring God into direct and positive evidence, by means of acts, which bring forward the energies of His immediate Fatherhood. All the growth of Eden had always testified to the existence and the name of God: but a new stage was reached when He was felt moving, in evening hours, amid the trees of the garden. And as the Father presses forward out of His silent background, so the secret sonship in man emerges out of its deep recesses in positive response, using its own secular faculties by which to carry itself forward into evidence and action. This definite and direct contact between the God Who is the hidden source of all life, and the faith which is the hidden spring of all human activity—this disclosure by the Father, met by this discovery by the son—this is Religion: and the history of Religion is the story of its slow and gradual advance in sanity and clearness, until it culminates in that special disclosure which we call Revelation; which, again, crowns itself in that Revelation of the Father through the Son, in which the disclosure of God to man and the discovery by man of God are made absolute in Him Who is one with the Father, knowing all that the Father does, making known all that the Father is.

Now here we have reached a parting of ways. For we have touched the point at which the distinctions start out between what is secular and what is sacred—between virtue and godliness—between the world and the Church. If ‘Religion’ means this coming forward into the foreground of that which is the universal background of all existence, then we cut ourselves free from the perplexity which benumbs us when we hear of the ‘Gospel of the Secular Life;’ of the ‘Religion of Humanity;’ of doctors and scientific professors being ‘Ministers of Religion;’ of the ‘Natural Religion’ which is contained within the borders of science with its sense of wonder, or of art with its vision of beauty. All this is so obviously true in one sense that it sinks to the level of an amiable commonplace; but if this be the sense intended, why is all this emphasis laid upon it? Yet if more than this is meant, we are caught in a juggling maze of words, and are losing hold on vital distinctions, and feel ourselves to be rapidly collapsing into the condition of the unhappy Ninevites, who knew not their right hands from their left.

The word ‘Religion,’ after all, has a meaning: and we do not get forward by labouring to disguise from ourselves this awkward fact. This positive meaning allows everything that can be asked in the way of sanctity and worth, for nature and the natural life. All of it is God-given, God-inspired, God-directed; all of it is holy. But the fact of this being so is one thing: the recognition of it is another; and it is this recognition of God in things which is the core and essence of religion. Natural life is the life in God, which has not yet arrived at this recognition: it is not yet, as such, religious. The sacred and supernatural office of man is to press through his own natural environment, to force his spirit through the thick jungle of his manifold activities and capacities, to shake himself free from the encompassing complexities, to step out clear and loose from all entanglement, to find himself, through and beyond all his secular experiences, face to face with a God, Who, on His side, is for ever pushing aside the veil which suggests and conceals Him, for ever disengaging Himself from the phenomena through which He arrives at man’s consciousness, for ever brushing away the confusions, and coming out more and more into the open, until, through and past the ‘thunder comes a human voice;’ and His eyes burn their way through into man’s soul; and He calls the man by his name, and takes him apart, and hides him in some high and separate cleft of the rock, far from all the glamour and tumult of crowded existence, and holds him close in the hollow of His hand as He passes by, and names to him, with clear and memorable voice, the ‘Name of the Lord, the Lord God, merciful, gracious, long-suffering, abundant in goodness and truth, forgiving iniquity, and Who will by no means clear the guilty.’ Here is Religion. It is the arrival at the secret; the discovery by the son of a Father, Who is in all His works, yet is distinct from them all,—to be recognised, known, spoken with, loved, imitated, worshipped, on His own account, and for Himself alone.

Religion, in this sense, is perfectly distinct from what is secular: yet, in making this distinction, it brings no reproach: it pronounces nothing common or unclean. It only asks us not to play with words: and it reminds us that, in blurring this radical distinction, we are undoing all the work which it has been the aim of the religious movement to achieve. For the history of this movement is the record of the gradual advance man has made in disentangling ‘the Name of God’ from all its manifestations. Religion is the effort to arrive at that Name, in its separable identity, in its personal and distinct significance. It is the fulfilment of the unceasing cry ‘Tell me Thy name!’ In religion we are engaged in the age-long task of lifting the Name, clear and high, above the clang and roar of its works, that through and by means of all that He is, we may pierce through to the very God of gods, and may close with Him in the blessed solitude of a love which knits heart to heart and spirit to spirit, without any withholding interval, with no veil to hinder or intervene.

The growth of faith, then, means the gradual increase of this personal contact, this spiritual intimacy between Father and son. To achieve this increasing apprehension of the Father’s character and love, faith uses, as instruments and as channels, all its natural faculties, by which to bring itself forward into action, and through which to receive the communications, which arrive at it from the heart and will of Him, Who, on His side, uses all natural opportunities as the material of a speech, which is ever, as man’s ear becomes sensitive and alert, growing more articulate, and positive, and personal.

The entire human nature,—imagination, reason, feeling, desire,—becomes to faith a vehicle of intercourse, a mediating aid in its friendship with God. But faith itself lies deeper than all the capacities of which it makes use: it is, itself, the primal act of the elemental self, there at the root of life, where the being is yet whole and entire, a single personal individuality, unbroken and undivided. Faith, which is the germinal act of our love for God, is an act of the whole self, there where it is one, before it has parted off into what we can roughly describe as separate and distinguishable faculties. It therefore uses, not one or other of the faculties, but all; and in a sense it uses them all at once, just as any complete motion of will, or of love, acts with all the united force of many combined faculties. A perfect act of love would combine, into a single movement, the entire sum of faculties, just because it proceeds from that basal self, which is the substance and unity of them all. So with faith. Faith, the act of a willing adhesion to God the Father, proceeds from a source deeper than the point at which faculties divide.

And this has a most vital bearing on the question of faith’s evidences. It is here we touch on the crucial characteristic which determines all our logical and argumentative position.

For, if a movement of faith springs from a source anterior to the distinct division of faculties, then no one faculty can adequately account for the resultant action. Each faculty, in its separate stage, can account for one element, for one factor, which contributed to the result: and that element, that factor, may be of greater or less importance, according to the rank of the faculty in the entire self. But, if the movement of faith has also included and involved many other elements which appear, when analysed out, in the domains of the other faculties; then the account which each separate faculty can give of the whole act, can never be more than partial. Its evidence must be incomplete. If the central self has gathered its momentum from many channels, it is obvious that the amount contributed by any one channel will be unable to justify the force exerted, or to explain the event that followed. If we track home each faculty employed to this central spring of energy, we shall see that each points to the result, contributes to it, suggests it; but the result will always be more than the evidence, so collected, can warrant.

This limitation, which we may allow about other faculties, is apt to become a stumbling-block when we apply it to the high gift of reason. Reason, somehow, seems to us to rise into some supreme and independent throne; it reviews the other faculties; and is, therefore, free from their limitations. We fear to hint that it has any lord over it. How can we assume such a lordship without dubbing ourselves irrational obscurantists, who in folly try to stamp out the light?

But we are not, in reality, dreaming of limiting reason by any limitations except those which it makes for itself. We are not violently attempting to make reason stop short at any point, where it could go on. We are only asking, is there any point at which it stops of itself, and cannot go further? We propose to use reason right out, to press it to its utmost limit, to spur it to put forth all its powers; and we assert that, so doing, reason will, at last, reveal its inability to get right to the end, to carry clear home. And why? Because the self is not only rational but something more: it combines, with its unbroken, central individuality, other elements besides reason: and therefore, of sheer necessity, whenever that central self puts out an elemental act in which the integral spring of personal energy takes part,—such as an act of will, or love, or faith,—then, reason can be but one factor, but one element, however important, in that issuing act: and if so, then it can give but a partial account of it; its own contribution can not wholly explain, or justify the result. In Bishop Butler’s language, the utmost that reason can do is to make it ‘very probable.’

The real root-question in this time-worn controversy is just this: is, or is not, reason the most primal and elemental act of the integral personality? If it is, then, of course, it regulates and determines all subordinate acts. Everything must finally submit to its arbitration: for everything, if tracked back far enough, must terminate in an act of reason.

But if, as Christianity asserts, the ultimate and elemental self be a moral will, that can believe, and love, then, though this self contains in it reason, it also goes back behind reason. Reason is indeed one of its essential elements, but it is not its entire essence, for this includes within itself, that which appears as feeling, and desire, and imagination, and choice, and passion, as well as that which shows itself as reason. When, therefore, the self puts out its primitive power, it will do actions which satisfy reason, indeed, but which reason cannot exhaustively analyse, or interpret, since the entire force of reason, if it were all brought into action, would still be only a partial contribution to the effect.

As a fact, we all of us are perfectly familiar with this limitation, in affairs of affection and friendship. We never have here that paralysing awe of reason, which haunts us in matters of religion. We never allow ourselves to be bullied into submission to its supremacy. We should laugh at it, if it attempted to dictate to us; or to account for all our motives. Not that we are at war with it: or are shirking it: or are afraid of it. We can have affections and friendships, which have every possible justification which reason can offer. Every conceivable expediency can unite to authorise and approve them. Every interest may be served by them. They may stand every test which a cool common-sense, or a calm impartial judgment, or an acute calculation of consequences can apply to them. They may be the very embodiment of reason. And yet, by no amount of calculated expediencies, by no pressure of rational considerations, could we dream, for one moment, that our friendship was accounted for. If ever it could trace its origin to these motives, it would cease to be what we thought it. The discovery would destroy it. All possible considerations and calculations might have been present, and yet they would be utterly powerless to create in us the love. And the love, however gladly it may recognise the approving considerations, would repudiate, with amazement, and with laughter, any presumption on their part to say, ‘this is why you love.’

It is the same with all primal acts of heroism. They may be absolutely rational: yet, they would cease to be heroic, they would never be done, if they did not call upon a force, which, indeed, may determine its direction by reason, but which uses quite other motives to induce itself to act. Utilitarianism, which attempts to account for such heroic momentum by purely rational considerations, finds itself reduced to shifts which all those can see through, who refuse to be juggled out of their own experiences. It is the same with all the higher forms of moral energy. All of them go beyond their evidences. They all lift the rational motives, which suggest and determine the direction of their activity, by an impulsive force, which has in it the power of initiative, of origination. Every high act of will is a new creation. As the gunpowder sleeps, until the spark alights upon it, so the directions of reason remain below the level of action, until the jet of a living will fuses its fire with their material. The act which results may, indeed, be capable of complete interpretation on reasonable grounds: it may be able to show reasons which account for every fragment of it: yet, still, the living force which drew together, and combined all those separate reasons into a single resultant act, has a creative and original character. The series of reasons, however complete, cannot account for the result, for they cannot possibly account for their own combination: and without this combination of their momentum the result would not be there.

It is well to recall briefly this character of the moral will, the affections, the love, of man. For these are faith’s nearest and dearest allies. It is here, in these elemental motions, that faith finds its closest parallel. It is something very like an act of will, a movement of love, an heroic and chivalrous moral venture. And whenever we desire to understand its relations to reason, we must persistently recall the attitude towards reason taken by these fundamental forms of energy; only remembering that faith is yet more elemental, yet more completely the act of the central integral self, even than these. Where they leave reason behind, it will do so yet further. Where they call upon something deeper, and more primitive than reason, it will do the same, and yet more triumphantly. It is not that either it or they are without reason: or that they stand outside reason, consulting it so far as they choose, and then dropping it; it is not that reason may not be found in every corner and fragment of their activity, pervading, colouring, restraining, limiting, directing, justifying it: but simply that what we call the rational self is not only rational, but also something more: that, if analysed out, the reason will not appear as the root and core of the man, but rather as an element inhering in a yet more central base: and that whenever the energy of vital action is put out, we are driven to look through and beyond reason, if we would unearth the source whence the act springs.

The relation, then, of reason to faith is not strange, or forced, or unfamiliar to us, if it is much the same as its relation to the affections, or to moral acts and intuitions. We know what to expect, what part it ought to play in such a case. As in a case of heroic moral daring, or high affection, so, in a matter of faith, we shall expect that reason, with its arguments and its evidences, will play all round and about it, will go before it, discussing the path to follow, will follow after it, unravelling the secret forces at work in it: will watch, and analyse, and learn, and warn; will reconnoitre, and examine, and survey, and discover: will justify, interpret, defend, assist. But yet we shall expect, also, that the act of faith will do more than all the arguments can anticipate: that it will hold itself free from them all: that it will appeal, not to them, but to its own inherent force, for the final decision: that it will move by instinct, by spontaneity, by inspiration: that it will rush past all evidences, in some great stride; that it will brush through scruples that cannot be gainsaid, and obstacles that cannot be got over; that it will surprise, that it will outdo, that it will create; that it will bring novel forces into play, invisible, unaccountable, incalculable; that it will fly, when reason walks; that it will laugh, when reason trembles: that it will over-leap barriers which reason deems final. As with love, so with faith, it will take in all evidences, it will listen to all proofs; but when they have done their utmost, it has yet got to begin; it itself, after all its calculations, must make the actual spring, which is the decision. Out of itself, it draws its strength: out of itself it makes its effort; by being what it is, it sees what it sees, it does what it does. It uses the evidence; but uses it to leap from, to go further. Its motives, advances, efforts, issue from within itself. Just as the lover’s final answer to the question, ‘why did you do that?’ must be, ‘because I loved’; so the final answer of the believer, in explanation of an act, can never be wrung out of the reasonable grounds for so acting; it must always be ‘because I believed.’ Just as man first acts, and speaks, and reason, following behind, can at last discover that his actions were all consecutive, and that his language has a perfect grammar; so faith has always to make its venture, prompted and inspired from within, and only long afterwards can it expect to learn that if it has been true to itself, to its proper promptings, then its action can, by slow and plodding reason, be thoroughly interpreted and justified. Faith is, above all things, anticipatory. The sonship, within, anticipates what the Father has in store for it: by means of affection, by rapid instincts of love, it assumes what it cannot yet verify, it foretells the secrets that lie hidden within the Father’s eyes. So anticipating, it makes its venture;—a venture which love alone can understand and justify, though the faithfulness of the eternal and supreme Father ensures that the anticipation shall receive its full verification.

If this be the relation of faith to reason, we see the explanation of what seems, at first sight, to the philosopher, to be the most irritating and hypocritical characteristic of faith. It is always shifting its intellectual defences. It adopts this or that fashion of philosophical apology; and then, when this is shattered by some novel scientific generalisation, faith, probably after a passionate struggle to retain the old position, suddenly and gaily abandons it, and takes up with the new formula, just as if nothing had happened: it discovers that the new formula is admirably adapted for its purposes, and is, in fact, just what it always meant, only it has unfortunately omitted to mention it. So it goes on, again and again; and no wonder that the philosophers growl at those humbugs, the clergy!

But they are criticising faith as if it were a theory, as if knowledge were its province, while, in truth, the seat of faith lies back behind the region of knowledge. Its radical acts and motives are independent of any particular condition of thought or science: they are deeper recessed; they exist in their own right, and under their own conditions. True, they may not be able to express themselves, to get their energies forward, to set themselves free, to manifest themselves, except through the mediation of knowledge,—through the instruments and channels which the science of the day provides them. But this does not confuse their inherent and distinct character. They never identify themselves with the tools they use. They sit quite loose to the particular state of thought, the formula, the terms, through which they make their way out into action. And, moreover, since the acts of faith are more radical than those of reason, and since they belong to the entire man acting in his integrity, they therefore of necessity anticipate, in their degree, all that the man, by slow development, by the patient industry of reasoning, will laboriously disclose. Lying deeper than all knowledge, they hold in them the condition under which all knowledge will be arrived at. They constitute the activity which ought to be at the background of all our reasoning. No particular or partial state of knowledge can exhaust their significance. Each step knowledge makes does but illustrate, in some new fashion, the relation of all knowledge to faith—does but elucidate the characteristics of that primal sonship. In each fresh discovery or generalisation, faith finds a new instrument for expressing its old convictions; it is taught to see the weak points, the imperfections of its former expressions; it understands where they hold good, and where they failed; it gets out more of itself than ever before, through the new channels opened to it; it discovers more of its own character by finding better modes in which to manifest it. It does but half know itself, so long as its expression is encumbered.

The advance of secular knowledge, then, is for faith, an acquired gain: for by it, it knows itself better; it sees more of what was involved in its vital convictions. It has a struggle, no doubt, in dropping off the expressions that have grown familiar to it, and in detecting the fresh insight into its own nature which it can win by the new terminology: but when once it has mastered the terms, new lights break out upon it, new suggestions flash, new capacities disclose themselves. It has won a new tool: when it has become familiarised with the use of it, it can do great and unexpected things with it.

But, for all that, it is but a new tool, worked by the old convictions; they have not changed, any more than love changes, though the slow development of married life may carry the lovers into unknown experiences, in foreign lands, under changed skies. The two, if they be faithful, learn far more of what the love they plighted means, as each sweeping revolution carries them hither and thither, than ever they understood on the wedding day; yet it is ever the old love then pledged, which they hold fast to the end. Its identity is emphasised by the changes. So with faith. It may absorb its energies in the joy of wielding the particular instrument with which, at any one moment, science supplies it. But it will never the least fear to drop it, so soon as the advancing skill and the pushing minds of men have elaborated for it some yet more delicate and subtle tool, wherewith to give free play to its native vitalities.

For faith is moved by but one solitary passion—the hope of cleaving, closer and ever closer, to the being of God. It is, itself, nothing but this act of personal adherence, of personal cohesion; and all else is, for it, material that can be subdued to this single service. Each bettering of knowledge intensifies the possibilities of this cohesion; and, for that, it is welcomed. It opens out fresh aspects of the good Father: it uncovers new treasures of His wisdom: therefore, for faith, it is an ever-mounting ladder, by which it draws nearer and nearer, spirit to spirit, heart to heart. No idle or indifferent matter this; and right knowledge, therefore, is for faith, a serious and pressing need. And, moreover, faith is pledged to use all possible guidance and direction in making its great act of self-surrender to God. And it is the peculiar office of reason, and of the rational conscience, to guard it from any distorted and unworthy venture. Faith has to make its leap; but to make it exactly in that direction, and in no other, where reason points the way. It is bound therefore to use all its intelligent resources: it may not fall below the level of its highest reason without the risk of sinking to a superstition. This is the radical difference between what we here claim, and that which a superstition demands of us. A superstition asks faith to shut its eyes. We ask it to open them as wide as it can. We demand this of it as a positive duty. It is bound, as an act of the whole man, to use every conceivable means and security which knowledge can bring it. For so alone can it secure itself against the hazards which encompass its adventure. It cannot afford to enter on that venturous committal of itself less equipped and instructed than it was open to it to be. It must put all to use that can better its offer of itself to God.

It is, in this seriousness, that faith is apt to embrace so fast the dominant scientific or philosophical creed. It has found, through this creed, a new and thrilling insight into God’s mind, and it fastens on this precious gift; and dwells delightedly on it, and spends itself in absorbing the peculiar truths which this particular way of thinking brings to the front. So that, at last, when the smash comes, when the floods break in, when the accumulation of new facts outside the old lines necessitates a total reconstruction of the intellectual fabric, faith seems to have gone under with the ruined scheme to which it had attached itself so firmly.

Yet, if ever it has implicated its own fate with that of any particular form of knowledge, it has been false to itself. It has no more right to identify itself with any intellectual situation than it has to pin its fortunes to those of any political dynasty. Its eternal task lies in rapid readjustment to each fresh situation, which the motion of time may disclose to it. It has that in it which can apply to all, and learn from all. Its identity is not lost, because its expressions vary and shift: for its identity lies deep in personality; and personality is that which testifies to its own identity by the variety and the rapidity of its self-adaptation to the changes of circumstance. So with faith. Its older interpretations of itself are not false, because the newer situations have called for different manifestations. Each situation forces a new aspect to the front. But ever it is God and the soul, which recognise each other under every disguise. Now it is in one fashion and now in another: but it is always one unalterable wisdom which is justified, recognised, and loved, by those who are her children.

We will not, then, be the least afraid of the taunt, that we are all accepting and delivering from our pulpits that which once threw us into anger and dismay. Only let us learn our true lesson; and, in our zeal to appreciate the wonders of Evolution, let us hold ourselves prepared for the day which is bound to come, when again the gathering facts will clamour for a fresh generalisation: and the wheel will give one more turn; and the new man will catch sight of the vision which is preparing; and the new book will startle; and the new band of youthful professors will denounce and demolish our present heroes; and all the reviews and magazines will yelp in chorus at their heels, proclaiming loudly that now, at last and for ever, the faith, which has pledged itself so deeply to the obsolete and discredited theory of Evolution, is indeed dead and done with. Faith will survive that crisis, as it has survived so many before: but it will be something, if it does not drag behind it the evil record of passion, and blindness, with which it has too often disgraced its unwilling passage from truth to truth.

IV. But here our objections take, perhaps, a new turn altogether. ‘Ah, yes!’ it will be said; ‘faith, if it were a simple surrender of the soul to God, a childlike adhesion of the spiritual sonship in us to its Father, Who is in heaven, might sit loose to all formulæ, theories, discoveries, in the way described. Faith, if it limited itself to this mystical communion, might be beyond the scope and criticism of reason. But this is not the least what you really ask of us. The faith, for which you practically plead, the only form of faith actually open to us, has rashly left these safe confines: it has implicated itself with a vast body of facts recorded in a book. It has involved itself in intricate statements of dogma. How can you claim to be free from the control of logic and criticism, in things so directly open to logical treatment? This spiritual faith of yours has mixed itself up with alien matter, with historical incidents, with intellectual definitions: here are things of evidence and proof. Here its locks are shorn; its mystic strength is gone. Delilah holds it fast; it is a prisoner in the hands of the Philistines. If you will retreat again back into the region of simple spiritual intuitions, and abandon to reason this debatable land, how gladly would we follow you! But that is just what you refuse to do.’

Now, here is the serious moment for us of to-day. It is quite true that all would be plain and easy, if we might be allowed to make this retreat—if we might limit our claims for the spirit to that simple childlike intuition which, instinctively, feels after, and surrenders to, the good Father in heaven. But what would that retreat mean? It would mean an attempt, desperate and blind, to turn back the world’s story, to ignore the facts, to over-leap the distinctions of time and place, to deny experience, to force ourselves back into primitive days, to imagine ourselves children again. Simple intuitions of God, simple communion with the Father, unquestioned, undistracted,—this is the privilege of primitive days, when minds are simple, when experience is simple, when society is simple. Plain, easy, and direct situations admit of plain, easy, and direct handling. But our situation is not plain, easy, or direct. Our minds are intricate and complicated; our story has been a long and a difficult one; our social condition is the perplexed deposit of age-long experiences. The faith, which is to be ours to-day, must be a faith of to-day. It cannot remain at the level of childhood, when nothing else in us or about us is the least childlike. It cannot babble out in pretty baby-language, when the situation with which it has to deal is terribly earnest, serious, perilous, and intense. It must be level with its work; and its work is complicated, hard, disciplined: how can it expect to accomplish it without effort, without pain, without training, without intricacy? The world is old; human life is old; and faith is old also. It has had many a strange and stormy experience; it has learned much on the way; it has about it the marks of old troubles; the care, the patience, the completeness of age, have left their stamp upon it. It has had a history, like everything else; and it reaches us to-day, in a form which that history behind it can alone make intelligible. Four thousand years have gone to its making—since Abraham first laid hold, in a definite and consistent manner, of the faith which is ours to-day. All those centuries it has been putting itself together, growing, enriching itself, developing, as it faced and measured each new issue, each gathering complication, each pressing hazard. This long experience has built up faith’s history: and, by study of that history, we can know why it was that faith could not stand still at that point where we should find it so convenient to rest. Faith appeals to its own story to justify its career; it bears about that history with it as its explanation, why, and how it has arrived at its present condition. That history is its proof how far it has left its first childhood behind it, how impossible it is, at the end of the days, to return to the beginning. The history, which constitutes our difficulty, is its own answer. For there, in that Bible, lies the recorded story of the facts which pressed hard upon the earliest intuition of God, and drove it forward, and compelled it to fix itself, and to define itself, and to take a firmer root, and to make for itself a secure dwelling-place, and to shape for itself a career. The Bible is the apology which our faith carries with it, and offers as a proof of the necessity which has forced it to go beyond its primitive efforts, until it has reached the stage at which we now encounter it. It portrays there, before our eyes, how it all began; how there came to this man and to that, the simple augury, the presage, the spasm of spiritual insight, the flash, the glimpse, the intimation; until there came the man, Abraham, in whom it won the emphasis, the solidity, the power, of a call. ‘Oh! that we might be content to feel, as he, the presence of the Everlasting! Why not leave us in peace, we cry, with the simple faith of Abraham?’ And the answer is plain: ‘because it is the nineteenth century after Christ, instead of the nineteenth century before.’ We are making a mistake of dates. Let us turn to our Bible and read. There we watch the reasons disclosing themselves why that simple faith could not abide in arrest at its first moment; why it must open a new career, with new duties, and new responsibilities, and new problems. The seed is sown, but it has to grow; to make good its footing amid the thick of human affairs; to root itself in the soil of human history; to spread itself out in institutions; to push its dominion; to widen its range; to become a tree that will fill the land. Before Abraham, it was but a flying seed, blown by the winds; now, it is a stable, continuous, masterful growth. It must be this, if it is ever to make effective its spiritual assertions over the increasing intricacy of human affairs.

What, let us ask, is that life of faith which historically began with Abraham? It is a friendship, an intimacy, between man and God, between a son and a father. Such an intimacy cannot be idle or stagnant; it cannot arrest its instinctive development. It holds in it infinite possibilities of growth: of increasing familiarity, of multiplied communion. And, thus, such a friendship creates a story of its own; it has its jars, its frictions, its entanglements; alas! on one side, its lapses, its quarrels, its blunders, its misunderstandings: and then, on the other, its corresponding indignations, and withdrawals, and rebukes; and yet again, its reconciliations, its reactions, its pardons, its victories. Ever it moves forward on its chequered path: ever God, the good Friend, spends Himself in recovering the intimacy, in renewing it, in purging it, in raising it. Its conditions expand: its demands intensify: its perils deepen: its glories gather: until it consummates its effort in the perfected communion of God and man—in Him, Who completes and closes the story of this ever-growing intimacy, by that act of supreme condescension which brings down God to inhabit and possess the heart of man: and by that act of supreme exaltation, which uplifts man into absolute union with the God Who made him.

This is the story: the Bible is its record. As a body of incidents and facts it must be subject to all the conditions of history and the laws of evidence; as a written record it introduces a swarm of questions, which can be sifted and decided by rational criticism. This entails complications, it must be confessed; but they are inevitable. The intimacy between man and God cannot advance, except through the pressure of connected and recorded experience. A human society which has no record of its past is robbed of its future. It is savage: it cannot go forward, because it cannot look back. So with this divine friendship. Its recorded experiences are the one condition of its growth. Without them it must always be beginning afresh: it must remain imprisoned at the starting-post. The length and complexity of its record is the measure of its progress; even though they must present, at the same time, a larger surface to the handling of criticism, and may involve a deeper degree of obscurity in details.

And, after all, though details drawn out of a dead past permit obscurity, the nature and character of the main issue become ever more fixed and distinct, as the long roll of circumstances discloses its richer secrets. The very shift and confusion of the surface-material throws out, in emphatic contrast, the firm outlines of the gathering and growing mystery. Ever the advance proceeds, throwing off all that is accidental, immaterial, subservient: ever man becomes clearer in his recognition of the claims made on him by the hope which God keeps ever before Him, ‘They shall be my people: I will be their God.’ Ever the necessities of such an intimate affection point to the coming of the Christ. Christ is the end, the sum, the completion, of this historic friendship: and His advent is, therefore, absolutely unintelligible unless it is held in relation to the long experience, which He interprets, justifies, and fulfils. Faith in Christ is the last result, the ultimate and perfected condition of that faith of Abraham, which enabled him to become the first friend of God. And the immense experience that lay between Abraham and St. Paul, can alone bridge the interval, can alone exhibit the slow and laborious evolution, through which the primitive apprehension of God was transformed into the Christian Creed—that mighty transformation, spread out over two thousand years of varied history, which our Lord summed up in the lightning-flash, ‘Your father Abraham rejoiced to see my day: and he saw it, and was glad.’ The Book is the record of those tested and certified experiments, which justified our Lord in asserting that to believe in God was, necessarily, to believe in Him. No one can understand that assertion, unless by seeing it worked out, in detail, by the searching logic of experience.

Faith in Christ, then, includes faith in the Bible: and, in saying that, we have already cleared away much of the difficulty that beset us. For our faith in Christ becomes the measure and standard of our faith in the Bible. We believe in it as the record of our growing intimacy with God. Faith is, still, a spiritual cohesion of person with person,—of the living soul with a living God. No details that intervene confuse this primitive relation. Only, that cohesion was not reached at one leap. It is ancient: it has traversed many incidents and trials: it has learned much: it has undergone patient apprenticeship: it has been bonded by the memory of multitudinous vicissitudes. Like all else that is human, it has grown. The details of events are the media of that growth. In that character they are vitally essential to the formed intimacy: but in that character alone. They are not valued for their own sake; but for the cause which they served. Belief in God never changes its character, and becomes belief in facts: it only developes into a deeper and deeper belief in God, as disciplined by facts. The facts must be real, if the discipline is to be real: but, apart from this necessity, we are indifferent to them. We can listen to anything which historical criticism has to tell us, of dates and authorship; of time and place. It may supply all the gaps in our record, showing how the material there briefly gathered, had, itself, a story, and slowly came together, and had sources and associations elsewhere. All such research adds interest to the record, as it opens out to us the action of the Divine Intimacy, in laying hold of its material. We watch it, by the aid of such criticism, at its work of assimilation; and, in uncovering its principles of selection, we apprehend its inner mind: we draw closer to our God. The more nearly we can ally the early conditions of Israel to those of Arabian nomads, the more delicate and rare becomes our apprehension of that divine relationship, which, by its perpetual pressure, lifted Israel to its marvellous supremacy, and which, by its absence, left the Arabian to be what he is to-day.

The point at which criticism must hold off its hands is, of course, a most subtle matter to decide. But we can, at least, be sure of this—that such a point will be no arbitrary one; it will be there, where criticism attempts to trench on the reality and the uniqueness of the Divine Intimacy, which those incidents served to fashion, and those books detected and recorded, and Christ consummated. Our faith in Christ must determine what, in the Bible, is vital to its own veracity. There is no other measure or rule of what we mean by inspiration.

The preparation for Christ, then, necessitates such complications as these. And the character of His advent intensified and thickened them. For, while asking of us the purest form of spiritual adherence, He makes that demand in a shape which is imbedded throughout in concrete historical facts, which, as facts, must be subject to the thumb of critical discussion, and to all the external handling of evidence and argument.

And, then, on the top of this, He has, of necessity, raised the question of His own Personality to such a pitch of vital value, that the full force of man’s intellectual activities is drawn towards its consideration,—is summoned to contemplate, and measure, and apprehend it,—is compelled to examine and face its tremendous issues. The supreme act of personal surrender, for which Christ unhesitatingly asks, cannot conceivably pass beyond its child-stage without forming a direct and urgent challenge to the intellect to say how, and why, such an act can be justified, or such a claim interpreted. No faith can reach to such an absolute condition without finding itself involved in anxieties, perils, problems, complications. Its very absoluteness is a provocation to the questioning and disputing mind,—to the hesitating and scrupulous will. And the result, the inevitable result, of such a faith—proposed, as it was, to a world no longer young and childlike, but matured, old, thoughtful, experienced—is the Dogmatic Creeds. We clamour against these intellectual complications: we cry out for the simple primitive faith. But, once again, it is a mistake of dates. We cannot ask to be as if eighteen centuries had dropped out, unnoticed—as if the mind had slumbered since the days of Christ, and had never asked a question. We cannot hope to be in the same condition after a question has been asked, as we were before it had ever occurred to us to ask it. The Creeds only record that certain questions have, as a fact, been asked. Could our world be what it is, and not have asked them? These difficulties of a complicated faith are only the reflection of the difficulties of a complicated life. If, as a fact, we are engaged in living a life which is intricate, subtle, anxious, then any faith which hopes to cover and embrace that life, cannot escape the necessity of being intricate, subtle, and anxious also. No child’s creed can satisfy a man’s needs, hunger, hopes, anxieties. If we are asked to throw over the complications of our Creeds, we must beg those that ask us, to begin by throwing over the complications of this social and moral life.

But still, with the Creeds as with the Bible, it is the personal intimacy with God in Christ which alone is our concern. We do not, in the strict sense, believe in the Bible, or in the Creeds: we believe solely and absolutely in Christ Jesus. Faith is our living act of adherence in Him, of cohesion with God. But still, once more, we must recognise that this act of adhesion has a history: it has gradually been trained and perfected: and this has been accomplished through the long and perilous experiences recorded in the Old Testament; and it has been consummated in the final sealing of the perfected intimacy attained in Him, in Whose person it was realised and made possible for us: and it has been guarded and secured to us in the face of the overwhelming pressure of eighteen strong, stormy, and distracted centuries. And therefore it is that we now must attain our cohesion with God, subject to all the necessities laid upon us by the fact that we enter on the world’s stage at a late hour, when the drama has already developed its plot and complicated its situations. This is why we cannot now, in full view of the facts, believe in Christ, without finding that our belief includes the Bible and the Creeds.

V. Faith is, still and always, a spiritual intimacy, a living friendship with God. That is what we must be for ever asserting. That is the key to all our problems; and once sure of this in all its bearings, we shall not be afraid of a taunt which is apt to sting especially those of us who are ordained. It is conveyed, in its noblest form, in a book of Mr. John Morley’s, on Compromise. No one can read that book without being the better or the worse for it. The intense force of high moral convictions acts upon us like a judgment. It evokes the deepest conscience in us to come forward, and stand at that austere bar and justify itself, or, in failing to justify itself, sink condemned. And in that book he asks the old question, with unequalled power: how can it possibly be honest for men to sign away their reason at the age of twenty-three?—to commit themselves to conclusions which they cannot have mastered—to anticipate beforehand all that experience may have to teach? In committing themselves to positions which any new knowledge or discovery may reverse, they have forbidden themselves the free use of their critical faculties: they have resigned their intellectual conscience.

What do we answer to that severe arraignment? Surely we now know well. Faith is an affair of personal intimacy, of friendship, of will, of love: and, in all such cases, we should know exactly what to do with language of this type. We should laugh it out of court. For it is language which does not belong to this region. It is the language, it expresses the temper, of the scientific student—a temper, an attitude specialised for a distinct purpose. That purpose is one of gradual advance into regions as yet untouched and unsuspected—an advance which is for ever changing the relations and classifications of those already partially known. The temper essential to such a purpose must be prepared for discovery, for development, for the unexpected; it is bound to be tentative, experimental, hypothetical—to be cool, critical, corrective. It deals with impersonal matter; and it must itself, therefore, be as far as possible impersonal, abstract, non-moral, without passion, without individuality, without a private intention, or will, or fixed opinion.

But such a temper, perfectly justified for scientific purposes, is absolutely impotent and barren in matters of moral feeling and practice.

The man who brings this temper into play in affairs of the will, or the heart, or the imagination, in cases of affection, friendship, passion, inspiration, generosity, in the things of home, of war, of patriotism, of love, is in the wrong world: he is a living blunder: he has no cue, no key, no interpretation. He is simply absurd.

And religion stands with these affairs. Just as we see well enough that if love were approached in this scientific spirit, it could not even begin, so it is quite as certain that, if faith were approached in this spirit, it could not even begin.

Mr. Morley has mixed up two different worlds. He is criticising that form of knowledge, which consists in spiritual apprehension of another’s personality through the whole force of a man’s inherent, and integral, and personal, will and desire, by the standard of another form of knowledge altogether, which consists in gradual and experimental assimilation of foreign and unknown matter through specialised organs of critical observation.

This latter knowledge is bound to be as far as possible emptied of personal elements. But our knowledge is nothing if not personal: it is the knowledge which issues, and issues only, out of the personal contact of life with life. And this is why it can afford to anticipate the future. For a person is a consistent and integral whole: if you know it at any one point, you know it in a sense at all points. The one character, the one will, disclose themselves through every partial expression, and passing gesture, and varying act. Therefore it is that, when two personalities draw towards one another in the touch of love, they can afford to plight their word. For love is the instinctive prophecy of a future adherence. It is the assurance, passing from soul to soul, that no new discovery of what is involved in their after-life together can ever deny, or defeat, or destroy their present mutual coherence in each other. That adhesion, that adaptability, which has been proved at a few points, will necessarily be justified throughout. The marriage-pledge expresses the absolute conviction that the present experience is irreversible, except by wilful sin. Whatever novelties the years bring with them, those two characters will abide what they are to-day. Growth cannot radically alter them.

Love, then, is this confident anticipation, which takes the future in pledge. And where this anticipation breaks down, it must be through human infirmity, wrong, misunderstanding.

And our knowledge of Christ is this knowledge of love; wherever it exists, and so far as it exists, it issues out of personal contact, personal inter-action. This is why, in its tested and certified form, i.e. in the accumulated and historic experience of the Catholic community, it can rationally justify its anticipation of an unbroken adherence.

And it can do so with complete confidence, because, here, on the side of Christ, there is no infirmity which can endanger the plighted faith: there is no lapse, no decline possible. Christ must be loyal, for He is sinless. And more: being sinless, He is consistent. Every part of Him is in harmony with the whole: in Him there is no unsteadiness, no insecurity. Such a flawless character is identical with itself: wherever it is touched, it can be tested and approved.

What, then, can upset our trust in Him? What can disturb our knowledge of Him? What fear of change can the years bring on? We may know but a tiny fragment, a fringe of this love of His to us, yet that is enough: to have felt it at all is to trust it for ever. We cannot hesitate to commit ourselves to One Who, if we know Him in any way, is known to be, by inward, personal, inherent necessity, the ‘same yesterday, to-day, and for ever.’

Yes!—but still it may be pleaded, that this anticipatory adherence, which might justifiably be given to a person beloved, cannot be pledged to dogmatic definitions. These, at any rate, are matters not of love, but of reason: they must be liable to critical examination, to intellectual revision. It is the pledge given to believe these dogmas in the future, which is such an outrage on intellectual morality.

Now, this protest, forcible and obvious as it looks at first sight, is still guilty of confusing the criticism which belongs to one province of knowledge with that which belongs to another. These dogmas of faith do not the least correspond to the classifications and laws of physical science; and for this reason, that the matter to which they relate is wholly different in kind. Dogmas represent reason in its application to a personal life: scientific generalisations represent reason as applied to matter, from which the conditions of personality have been rigorously and rightly excluded. The difference is vital; and it affects the entire character of the working of reason.

The dogmatic definitions of Christian theology can never be divorced from their contact in the personality of Christ. They are statements concerning a living character. As such, and only as such, do they come within the lines of faith. We do not, in the strict sense, believe in them: for belief is never a purely intellectual act; it is a movement of the living man drawn towards a living person. Belief can only be in Jesus Christ. To Him alone do we ever commit ourselves, surrender ourselves, for ever and aye. But a personality, though its roots lie deeper than reason, yet includes reason within its compass: a personality cannot but be rational, though it be more than merely rational; it has in it a rational ground, a rational construction; it could not be what it is without being of such and such a fixed and organic character. And a personality, therefore, is intelligible; it lays itself open to rational treatment; its characteristics can be stated in terms of thought. The Will of God is the Word of God; the Life is also the Light. That which is loved can be apprehended; that which is felt can be named. So the Personality of the Word admits of being rationally expressed in the sense that reason can name and distinguish those elements in it, which constitute its enduring and essential conditions. The dogmas now in question, are simply careful rehearsals of those inherent necessities which, inevitably, are involved in the rational construction of Christ’s living character. They are statements of what He must be, if He is what our hearts assure us; if He can do that for which our wills tender Him their lifelong self-surrender. Unless these rational conditions stand, then, no act of faith is justifiable; unless His personality correspond to these assertions, we can never be authorised in worshipping Him.

But, if so, then we can commit ourselves to these dogmas in the same way, and degree, as we commit ourselves to Him. We can do so, in the absolute assurance that He cannot but abide for ever, that which we know Him to be to-day. We know Him indeed, but ‘in part:’ but it is part of a fixed and integral character, which is whole in every part; and can never falsify, in the future, the revelation which it has already made of itself.

The real question, as to Christian dogma, lies in the prior question—Is Christianity justified in claiming to have reached a final position? If the position is rightly final, then the intellectual expression of its inherent elements is final also. Here is the deep contrast between it and science. The scientific man is forbidden, by the very nature of his studies, to assume finality for his propositions. For he is not yet in command of his material. Far, very far, from it. He is touching it on its very edge. He is engaged in slowly pushing tentative advances into an unknown world, looming, vast, dim, manifold, beyond his frontier of light. The coherence of his known matter with that huge mass beyond his ken, can be but faintly imaged and suspected. Wholly unreckoned forces are in operation. At any moment he may be called upon to throw over the classification which sums up his hitherto experience; he may have to adopt a new centre; to bring his facts into a novel focus; and this involves at once a novel principle of arrangement. In such conditions dogma is, of course, an absurdity. But, if we are in a position to have any faith in Jesus Christ, then we must suppose that we have arrived at the one centre to all possible experiences, the one focus, under which all sights must fall. To believe in Him at all is to believe that, by and in ‘this Man, will God judge the world.’ In His personality, in His character, we are in possession of the ultimate principle, under which the final estimate of all things will be taken. We have given us, in His sacrifice and mission, the absolute rule, standard, test, right to the very end. Nothing can fall outside it. In Him, God has summed up creation. We have touched, in Him, the ‘last days,’ the ultimate stage of all development. We cannot believe in Him at all, and not believe that His message is final.

And it is this finality which justifies dogma. If Christianity is final, it can afford to be dogmatic; and we, who give our adhesion to it, must, in so doing, profess our adhesion to the irreversible nature of its inherent principles: for, in so doing, we are but re-asserting our belief in the absolute and final sufficiency of His person.

Let us venture, now, to review the path that we have travelled, in order that we may see at what point we have arrived. Faith, then, is, from first to last, a spiritual act of the deepest personal will, proceeding out of that central core of the being, where the self is integral and whole, before it has sundered itself off into divided faculties. There, in that root-self, lie the germs of all that appears in the separate qualities and gifts—in feelings, in reason, in imagination, in desire; and faith, the central activity, has in it, therefore, the germs of all these several activities. It has in it that which becomes feeling, yet is not itself a feeling. It has in it that which becomes reason, yet is not itself the reason. It holds in it imaginative elements, yet is no exercise of the imagination. It is alive with that which desires, craves, loves; yet is not itself merely an appetite, a desire, a passion. In all these qualities it has its part: it shares their nature; it has kindred motions; it shows itself, sometimes through the one, and sometimes through the other, according to the varieties of human, characters. In this man, it can make the feeling its main instrument and channel; in that man, it will find the intellect its chief minister; in another, it will make its presence known along the track of his innermost craving for a support in will and in love. But it will always remain something over, and beyond, any one of its distinctive media; and not one of these specialities of gift will ever, therefore, be able to account wholly for the faith which puts it to use. That is why faith must always remain beyond its realised evidences. If it finds, in some cases, its chief evidences in the region of feeling, it is nevertheless open to deadly ruin, if ever it identifies itself with these evidences, as if it could rely on them to carry it through. It may come into being by their help; but it is never genuine faith, until it can abide in self-security at those dry hours, when the evidences of positive feeling have been totally withdrawn. And as with feeling; so with reason. Faith looks to reason for its proofs: it must count on finding them; it offers for itself intellectual justifications. It may arrive at a man by this road. But it is not itself reason; it can never confuse itself with a merely intellectual process. It cannot, therefore, find, in reason, the full grounds for its ultimate convictions. Ever it retains its own inherent character, by which it is constituted an act of personal trust—an act of willing and loving self-surrender to the dominant sway of another’s personality. It is always this, whether it springs up instinctively, out of the roots of our being, anticipating all after-proof, or whether it is summoned out into vitality at the close of a long and late argumentative process. No argument, no array of arguments, however long, however massive, can succeed in excusing it from that momentous effort of the inner man, which is its very essence. Let reason do its perfect work: let it heap up witness upon witness, proof upon proof. Still there will come at last the moment when the call to believe will be just the same to the complete and reasonable man as it always is to the simplest child—the call to trust Another with a confidence which reason can justify but can never create. This act, which is faith, must have in it that spirit of venture, which closes with Another’s invitation, which yields to Another’s call. It must still have in it and about it the character of a vital motion,—of a leap upward, which dares to count on the prompting energies felt astir within it.

Faith cannot transfer its business into other hands to do its work for it. It cannot request reason to take its own place, or achieve its proper results. There is no possibility of devolution here; it cannot delegate its functions to this faculty or to that. It is by forgetting this that so many men are to be found, at the close of many arguments of which they fully acknowledge the convincing force, still hovering on the brink of faith, never quite reaching it, never passing beyond the misery of a prolonged and nerveless suspense. They hang back at the very crisis, because they have hoped that their reasoning powers would, by their own force, have made belief occur. They are like birds on a bough, who should refuse to fly until they have fully known that they can. Their suspense would break and pass, if once they remembered that, to enter the Kingdom of Heaven, they must always be as little children. They must call upon the child within them. At the end, as at the beginning, of all the argumentative work, it is still the temper of a child which they must bring into play. There must still be the energy of self-committal,—the movement of a brave surrender. Once let them turn, enforced by all the pressure of reasonable evidence, to this secret fount of life within the self, and back flows the strength which was theirs long ago, when the inspiration of their innate sonship moved sweetly in them, breeding confidence, secure of itself, undaunted, and unfatigued. That sonship abides in us all, cumbered and clouded though it be by our sin; it abides on and on, fed by the succours of a Father Who can never forget or forsake, and Who is working hitherto to recover and redeem. And while it abides, faith is still possible. For its native motions are the spontaneous outcome of that spiritual kinship which, if once alive and free, impels us towards Him by Whose love we have been begotten. Reason and feeling, proof and argument—these are means and instruments by which we can invoke this sonship into action, and release it from much which fetters and enslaves. But it is the actual upspringing force of the sonship itself, which alone can be the source of belief. And as it is given to all to be sons of God, through the eternal sonship of Christ, therefore it is open to all to count upon possessing the conditions of faith in God.

Note.—This essay has, for its sole aim, the reassurance of an existing faith in face of temporary perplexities. It therefore takes faith as a present and possible fact. It assumes man to be a creature who believes. And it tries to show why such belief, if it be there, should not be discouraged by difficulties which belong to the very nature of its original grounds. For this it recalls the depth and security with which the roots of faith run back into the original constitution of man; which original constitution, however broken, thwarted, maimed, polluted by sin, remains still in us as the sole pledge and ground of our possible redemption in Christ, Who comes to restore the blurred image of God in us, and Who must find in us the radical elements of the supernatural nature which He enters to renew. To its enduring existence in the heart of man Christ always appeals. Men are still children of their Father Who is in heaven; and therefore He can demand, as the sole and primal condition of redemption, Faith, which is the witness of the unlost sonship. That faith He still assumes to be possible, by the invitation to man to believe and so be healed. He makes this invitation just as if it were in man’s own power to respond to it without for the moment touching on the necessity which, through the very effort to believe, man will discover for himself—i.e. the necessity of God’s gift of the Spirit to make such belief exist. Such a gift belonged to the original condition of unfallen man, when his nature was itself supernaturally endowed with its adequate and sustaining grace. Such a gift had to be renewed, after the ruin wrought by sin, both by the restoration of the broken sonship within the man through the beloved Son, as well as by the renewal of the evoking and sustaining Spirit that should lift up, from within the inner sonship, its living cry of Abba, Father. The right to believe, and the power to believe, had both to be re-created.

But all that was so re-created has, for its preliminary ground, the original constitution of man’s sinless nature; and, in all our treatment of redemption, we must begin by recalling what it was which Christ entered to restore. That original condition was the pledge of the recovery which God would bring to pass; and, throughout the interval between fall and rescue, it could anticipate the coming Christ by the faith which rejoiced to see His Day, and saw His Glory, and spake of Him. Therefore the faith which Christ raises to its new and higher power by concentrating it upon His own Personality, is still, at core, the old faith which was the prophetic witness given, under the conditions of the earlier covenant, by that great army of the Faithful which is marshalled before us by the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews, who most certainly considers it possible and justifiable to emphasise the continuity that holds between the faith of Abraham and the faith of the redeemed.

Notes

53 Cf. on all this, an excellent statement in Mark Pattison’s Sermons, Serm. 7.

54 It is not intended to deny that the mind can ever know itself, but only that such knowledge can ever be won by methods of empirical observation.

55 The word ‘super-natural’ is obviously misleading, since it seems to imply that the higher spiritual levels of life are not ‘natural.’ Of course, the higher the life, the more intensely ‘natural’ it is; and the nature of God must be the supreme expression of the natural. But the word ‘super-natural’ is, in reality, only concerned with the partial and conventional use of ‘nature,’ as a term under which we sum up all that constitutes this present and visible system of things.

56 It is this point of arrest which is reached and revealed by the process of Evolution, under the pressure of Natural Selection.

57 Faith is spoken of, here and elsewhere, in its perfect and true form, as if unthwarted by the misdirection, and hurt of sin.

58 Cf. pp. 105-107.