Chapter II — Faith a Road to Truth

Daily Readings

Many minds are prevented from even a fair consideration of religious faith by prejudices which spring, not from reasoned argument, but from practical experience. They are biased before argument has begun; they feel that faith means credulity, and that religious faith in particular is a surrender of reason. Before we positively present faith as an indispensable means of dealing with reality in any realm, let us, in the daily readings, consider some of the practical experiences and attitudes that thus prejudice people against religion.

Second Week, First Day

Many people are biased in advance by the unwise treatment to which in their childhood they were subjected. Paul pictures the home life of Timothy as ideal:

I thank God, whom I serve with a pure conscience, as my forefathers did, as without ceasing I remember you in my prayers night and day, greatly desiring to see you, being mindful of your tears, that I may be filled with joy, when I call to remembrance the genuine faith that is in you, which dwelt first in your grandmother Lois and your mother Eunice, and I am persuaded is in you also. —2 Timothy 1:3–5 (NKJV)

"Genuine faith" is often a family heritage, handed down by vital contagion. But in many homes religion is not beautifully presented to the children; it is a hard and rigorous affair of dogma and restraint. "Oh, why," said a young professional man, whom Professor Coe quotes, "why did my parents try to equip me with a doctrinal system in childhood? I supposed that the whole system must be believed on pain of losing my religion altogether. And so, when I began to doubt some points, I felt obliged to throw all overboard. I have found my way back to positive religion, but by what a long and bitter struggle!" If, however, one has been so unfortunate as to be hardened in youth by unwise training, is it reasonable on that account to forever shut oneself out from the most glorious experience of life? This complaint about mistreatment in youth is often an excuse, not a reason for irreligion. Says Phillips Brooks: "I have grown familiar to weariness with the self-excuse of men who say, 'Oh, if I had not had the terrors of the law so preached to me when I was a boy, if I had not been so confronted with the woes of hell and the awfulness of the judgment day, I should have been religious long ago.' My friends, I think I never hear a meaner or a falser speech than that. Men may believe it when they say it — I suppose they do — but it is not true. It is unmanly, I think. It is throwing on their teaching and their teachers, or their fathers and their mothers, the fault which belongs to their own neglect, because they have never taken up the earnest fight with sin and sought through every obstacle for truth and God. It has the essential vice of dogmatism about it, for it claims that a different view of God would have done for them that which no view of God can do, that which must be done, under any system, any teaching, by humility and penitence and struggle and self-sacrifice. Without these no teaching saves the soul. With these, under any teaching, the soul must find its Father."

O God, who laid the foundations of the earth amid the singing of the morning stars and the joyful shouts of the sons of God, lift up our little life into Your gladness. Out of You, as out of an overflowing fountain of Love, there wells forth eternally a stream of blessing upon every creature You have made. If we have thought that You called this universe into being in order to win praise and honor for Yourself, rebuke the vain fancies of our foolish minds and show us that Your glory is the joy of giving. We can give You nothing of our own. All that we have is Yours. Oh, then, help us to glorify You by striving to be like You. Make us just and pure and good as You are. May we be partakers of the Divine Nature, so that all that is truly human in us may be deepened, purified, and strengthened. And so may we be witnesses for You, lights of the world, reflecting Your light.

Help us to make religion a thing so beautiful that all people may be won to surrender to its power. Let us manifest in our lives its sweetness and excellency, its free and ennobling spirit. Forbid that we should go up and down the world with melancholy looks and dejected faces, lest we should repel people from entering Your Kingdom. Rather, may we walk in the freedom and joy of faith, and with Your new song in our mouths, so that others looking on us may learn to trust and to love You. Amen. —Samuel McComb.

Second Week, Second Day

Many people are prejudiced against religion during their youthful period of revolt against authority. Listen to an ancient father talking with his sons:

Hear, my children, the instruction of a father, and give attention to know understanding; for I give you good doctrine: do not forsake my law. When I was my father's son, tender and the only one in the sight of my mother, he also taught me, and said to me: "Let your heart retain my words; keep my commands, and live. Get wisdom! Get understanding! Do not forget, nor turn away from the words of my mouth. Do not forsake her, and she will preserve you; love her, and she will keep you. Wisdom is the principal thing; therefore get wisdom. And in all your getting, get understanding. Exalt her, and she will promote you; she will bring you honor, when you embrace her. She will place on your head an ornament of grace; a crown of glory she will deliver to you." —Proverbs 4:1–9 (NKJV)

No father can read this urgent, anxious plea without understanding the reason for its concern. Every young person comes to the time when they break away from parental authority and begin to take their life into their own hands. It is one of youth's great crises, and the spirit of it is sometimes harsh and rebellious. So Carlyle describes his own experience: "Such transitions are ever full of pain: thus the Eagle when he moults is sickly; and, to attain his new beak, must harshly dash-off the old one upon rocks." For religious faith this period of life is always critical. Stevenson in his revolt, when he called respectability "the deadliest gag and wet-blanket that can be laid on man," also became, as he said, "a youthful atheist." How many have traveled that road and stopped in the negation! Stevenson did not stop, and years afterward wrote of his progress: "Because I have reached Paris, I am not ashamed of having passed through Newhaven and Dieppe." Surely if anyone has been "a youthful atheist," it was an experience to be "passed through."

O God, we turn to You in the faith that You understand and are very merciful. Some of us are not sure concerning You; not sure what You are; not sure that You are at all. Yet there is something at work behind our minds — in times of stillness we hear it, like a distant song; there is something in the sky at evening-time; something in the face of another person. We feel that around our incompleteness flows Your greatness, around our restlessness Your rest. Yet this is not enough.

We want a heart to speak to, a heart that understands; a friend to whom we can turn, a breast on which we may lean. O that we could find You! Yet could we ever think these things unless You had inspired us, could we ever want these things unless You Yourself were very near?

Some of us know full well; but we are sorely afraid. We dare not yield ourselves to You, for we fear what that might mean. Our foolish freedom, our feeble pleasures, our fatal self-indulgence suffice to hold us back from You, though You are our very life, and we so sick and needing You. Our freedom has proved false, our pleasures have long since lost their zest, our sins — oh how we hate them!

Come and deliver us, for we have lost all hope in ourselves. Amen. —W. E. Orchard.

Second Week, Third Day

Some people — often the precocious, clever ones — are biased against religion because in youth they accepted an immature philosophy of life and have never changed it. The crust forms too soon on some minds, and if it forms during the period of youthful revolt, they are definitely prejudiced against religious truth. The difference between such folk and the great believers is not that the believers had no doubts, but that they did not fix their final thought of life until more mature experience had come. They fulfilled the admonition of a wise father to keep up a tireless search for truth:

My son, if you receive my words, and treasure my commands within you, so that you incline your ear to wisdom, and apply your heart to understanding; yes, if you cry out for discernment, and lift up your voice for understanding, if you seek her as silver, and search for her as for hidden treasures; then you will understand the fear of the Lord, and find the knowledge of God. —Proverbs 2:1–5 (NKJV)

Mrs. Charles Kingsley, for example, says of her husband that at twenty "He was full of religious doubts; and his face, with its unsatisfied, hungering, and at times defiant look, bore witness to the state of his mind." At twenty-one Kingsley himself wrote: "You believe that you have a sustaining Hand to guide you along that path, an Invisible Protection and an unerring Guide. I, alas! have no stay for my weary steps, but that same abused and stupefied reason which has stumbled and wandered, and betrayed me a thousand times ere now, and is every moment ready to faint and to give up the unequal struggle." If Kingsley had framed his final philosophy then, what a loss to the world of an inspiring life transfigured by Christian faith! He cried after discernment, lifted up his voice for understanding, and he found the knowledge of God. Many a person ought to revise in the light of mature experience and thought a hasty irreligious guess at life's meaning which they made in youth.

O Father, we turn to You because we are sorely vexed with our own thoughts. Our minds plague us with questions we cannot answer; we are driven to voyage on strange seas of thought alone. Do You disturb our minds with endless questioning, yet keep the answers hidden in Your heart, so that away from You we should always be perplexed, and by thoughts derived from You be ever drawn to You? Surely, our God, it must be so.

But still more bitter and humbling, O Father, is our experience of failure, so frequent, tragic, and unpardonable. We have struggled on in vain; resolves are broken before they pass our lips; we can see no hope of better things, we can never forgive ourselves; and after all our prayers our need remains and our sense of coming short only deepens. Yet, at least we know that we have failed — and how, if something higher than ourselves were not at work within?

Our desperate desires have driven us at last to You, conscious now, after all vain effort, that it is You alone who can satisfy, and now at peace to know that it is You who are desired, because it is You who desires within us. Beyond our need reveal Yourself, its cause and cure; in all desire teach us to discern Your drawing near. Amen. —W. E. Orchard.

Second Week, Fourth Day

People are often prejudiced against religion because the churches which they happened to attend in youth urged on them an irrational faith. Some never recover from the idea that all religion everywhere must always be the same kind of religion against which in youth their good sense rose in revolt; they are in perpetual rebellion against religion as it was when they broke with it a generation ago. But if one thing more than another grows, expands, and becomes in the intelligent and pure increasingly pure and intelligent, it is religion.

Consider an early Hebrew idea of God:

And it came to pass on the way, at the encampment, that the Lord met him and sought to kill him. Then Zipporah took a sharp stone and cut off the foreskin of her son and cast it at Moses' feet, and said, "Surely you are a husband of blood to me!" So He let him go. Then she said, "You are a husband of blood!" — because of the circumcision. —Exodus 4:24–26 (NKJV)

Over against so abhorrent a picture of a deity who would have committed murder, had not a mother swiftly circumcised her son, consider a later thought of God:

"What do you think? If a man has a hundred sheep, and one of them goes astray, does he not leave the ninety-nine and go to the mountains to seek the one that is straying? And if he should find it, assuredly, I say to you, he rejoices more over that sheep than over the ninety-nine that did not go astray. Even so it is not the will of your Father who is in heaven that one of these little ones should perish." —Matthew 18:12–14 (NKJV)

So religion grows with our capacity to receive higher, finer revelations of the divine. And in no age of the world has so great a change passed over the intellectual framework of faith as in the generation just gone. To live in protest against forms of belief a generation old is fighting men of straw; the vanguard of religious thought and life has pushed ahead many a mile beyond the point of such attack. People who threw away the living water of the Gospel because they disliked the water-buckets in which their boyhood churches presented it are living spiritually thirsty lives when there is no reasonable need of their doing so. There is many an unbeliever with a "God-shaped blank" in their heart, who could be a confident and joyful believer if they only knew what religion means to people of faith today.

O God, who has formed all hearts to love You, made all ways to lead to Your face, created all desire to be unsatisfied save in You; with great compassion look upon us gathered here. Our presence is our prayer, our need the only plea we dare to claim, Your purposes the one assurance we possess.

Some of us are very confused; we do not know why we were ever born, for what end we should live, which way we should take. But we are willing to be guided. Take our trembling hands in Yours, and lead us on.

Some of us are sore within. We long for love and friendship, but we care for no one and we feel that no one cares for us. We are misunderstood, we are lonely, we have been disappointed, we have lost our faith in others and our faith in life. Will You not let us love You who first loved us?

Some of us are vexed with passions that frighten us; to yield to them would mean disaster, to restrain them is beyond our power, and nothing earth contains exhausts their vehemence or satisfies their fierce desire.

And so because there is no answer, no end or satisfaction in ourselves; and because we are what we are, and yet long to be so different; we believe You are, and that You understand us. By faith we feel after You, through love we find the way, in hope we bring ourselves to You. Amen. —W. E. Orchard.

Second Week, Fifth Day

Many minds are prejudiced against religion because, having gone so far as to feel the credulity of religious belief, they have never gone further and seen the credulity of religious unbelief. Irreligion implies a creed just as surely as religion does; and many a person's return to faith has begun when their faculties of doubt, which until then had been used only against belief in God, became active against belief in no-God. Mr. Gilbert Chesterton, with his characteristic vividness and exaggeration, narrates such an experience: "I never read a line of Christian apologetics. I read as little as I can of them now. It was Huxley and Herbert Spencer and Bradlaugh who brought me back to orthodox theology. They sowed in my mind my first wild doubts of doubt. Our grandmothers were quite right when they said that Tom Paine and the free-thinkers unsettled the mind. They do. They unsettled mine horribly. The rationalist made me question whether reason was of any use whatever; and when I had finished Herbert Spencer I had got as far as doubting (for the first time) whether evolution had occurred at all. As I laid down the last of Colonel Ingersoll's atheistic lectures the dreadful thought broke across my mind, 'Almost thou persuadest me to be a Christian.' I was in a desperate way." Lest Mr. Chesterton's whimsicality may hide the seriousness of such an experience, we may add that Robert Louis Stevenson's first break with his "youthful atheism" came when, under the influence of Professor Fleeming Jenkin, he too began to have his "first wild doubts of doubt." He began thinking, as he says, that "certainly the church was not right, but certainly not the anti-church either." Many a person has played unfairly with their doubts; they have used them against religion, but not against irreligion. When they are thorough with their doubts they may join the many who understand what the apostle meant when he wrote to Timothy:

O Timothy! Guard what was committed to your trust, avoiding the profane and idle babblings and contradictions of what is falsely called knowledge — by professing it some have strayed concerning the faith. Grace be with you. Amen. —1 Timothy 6:20–21 (NKJV)

O God, too near to be found, too simple to be conceived, too good to be believed; help us to trust, not in our knowledge of You, but in Your knowledge of us; to be certain of You, not because we feel our thoughts of You are true, but because we know how far You transcend them. May we not be anxious to discern Your will, but content only with desire to do it; may we not strain our minds to understand Your nature, but yield ourselves and live our lives only to express You.

Show us how foolish it is to doubt You, since You Yourself set the questions which disturb us; reveal our unbelief to be faith fretting at its outworn form. Be gracious when we are tempted to cease from moral strife: reveal what it is that struggles in us. Before we tire of mental search enable us to see that it was not ourselves but Your call which stirred our souls.

Turn us back from our voyages of thought to that which sent us forth. Teach us to trust not to cleverness or learning, but to that inward faith which can never be denied. Lead us out of confusion to simplicity. Call us back from wandering without to find You at home within. Amen. —W. E. Orchard.

Second Week, Sixth Day

Many people are biased in favor of their habitual doubt because they do not see that positive faith is the only normal state of life. We live not by the things of which we are uncertain, but by the things which we truly believe. Columbus doubted many of the old views in geography, but these negations did not make him great; his greatness sprang from the positive beliefs which he confidently held and on which he launched his splendid adventure. Goethe is right when he makes Mephistopheles, his devil, say, "I am the spirit of negation," for negation, save as it paves the way for positive conviction, always bedevils life. The psalmist reveals the ideal experience for every doubter.

First, uncertainty:

But as for me, my feet had almost stumbled; my steps had nearly slipped. For I was envious of the boastful, when I saw the prosperity of the wicked. —Psalm 73:2–3 (NKJV)

Then vision:

When I thought how to understand this, it was too painful for me — until I went into the sanctuary of God; then I understood their end. —Psalm 73:16–17 (NKJV)

Then, positive assurance:

You will guide me with Your counsel, and afterward receive me to glory. Whom have I in heaven but You? And there is none upon earth that I desire besides You. My flesh and my heart fail; but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever. —Psalm 73:24–26 (NKJV)

Doubt, therefore, does have real value in life; it clears away rubbish and stimulates search for truth; but it has no value unless it is finally swallowed up in positive assurance. So Tennyson pictures the experience of his friend, Arthur Hallam:

O Most Merciful, whose love to us is mighty, patient,¹ and infinitely tender; lead us beyond all idols and imaginations of our minds to contact with You, the real and abiding; past all barriers of fear and beyond all paralysis of failure to that furnace of flaming purity where falsehood, sin, and cowardice are all consumed away. It may be that we know not what we ask; yet we dare not ask for less.

Our aspirations are hindered because we do not know ourselves. We have tried to slake our burning thirst at broken cisterns, to comfort the crying of our spirits with baubles and trinkets, to assuage the pain of our deep unrest by drugging an accusing conscience, believing a lie, and veiling the naked flame that burns within. But now we know You make us never to be content with anything save Yourself, in earth, or heaven, or hell.

Sometimes we have sought You in agony and tears, scanned the clouds and watched the ways of others, considered the stars and studied the moral law; and returned from all our search no surer and no nearer. Yet now we know that the impulse to seek You came from You alone, and what we sought for was the image You had first planted in our hearts.

We may not yet hold You fast or feel You near, but we know You hold us. All is well. Amen. —W. E. Orchard.

Second Week, Seventh Day

People are often prejudiced against religion or any serious consideration of it, because they never have felt any vital need of God. To study wireless telegraphy in the safe seclusion of a college laboratory is one thing; to hear the wireless apparatus on a floundering ship send out its call for help across a stormy sea is quite a different matter. Many folk have never thought of faith in God save with a mild, intellectual curiosity; they do not know those deep experiences of serious souls with sin and sorrow and anxiety, with burden for great causes and desire for triumphant righteousness in people and nations — experiences that throw us back on God as our only sufficient refuge and hope. We never really find God until we need Him; and some never feel the need of Him until life plunges them into a shattering experience. Even in scientific research new discoveries are made because people want them, and Mayer, lighting on a theory that proved to be of great value, says, "Engaged during a sea voyage almost exclusively with the study of physiology, I discovered the new theory, for the sufficient reason that I vividly felt the need of it." How much more must the vital discovery of God depend on life's conscious demand for Him! And how certainly a shallow, frivolous nature, unstirred by the deep concerns of life, is biased against any serious interest in religious faith! Great believers have first of all thirsted for God.

"Ho! Everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and you who have no money, come, buy and eat. Yes, come, buy wine and milk without money and without price. Why do you spend money for what is not bread, and your wages for what does not satisfy? Listen carefully to Me, and eat what is good, and let your soul delight itself in abundance. Incline your ear, and come to Me. Hear, and your soul shall live; and I will make an everlasting covenant with you — the sure mercies of David.... Seek the Lord while He may be found, call upon Him while He is near. Let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts; let him return to the Lord, and He will have mercy on him; and to our God, for He will abundantly pardon." —Isaiah 55:1–3, 6–7 (NKJV)

Grant to us, we pray, the lost hunger and thirst after righteousness — the longing for God. Grant to us that drawing power by which everything that is in us shall call out for You. Become necessary to us. With the morning and evening light, at noon and at midnight, may we feel the need of Your companionship.... Though You do not speak as people speak, yet You can call out to us; and the soul shall know Your presence, and shall understand by its own self what You mean. Grant to us this witness of the Spirit, this communion of the soul with You — and not only once or twice: may we abide in the light.

You have come to Your own; and even as of old, Your own know You not, and believe You not. How many there are who have learned Your name upon their mother's knee, but have forgotten it! How many there are who grew up into the happiness of a childhood in which piety presided, but have gone away, and have not come back again to their first love and to their early faith! How many there are marching on now in the Sahara of indifference and in the wilderness of unbelief!... Lord, look upon them; have merciful thoughts toward them, and send out those gracious influences of power by which what is best in them shall lift itself up and bear witness against that which is worst. Amen. —Henry Ward Beecher.

Comment for the Week

I

We are to deal in this chapter with one of the most common experiences of doubt and are to attempt the statement of a truth useful in meeting it. Many minds are undone at the first symptoms of religious uncertainty, because they suppose that their doubt is philosophical, and they feel a paralyzing inability to deal with philosophy at all. As people have been known to take to their beds at hearing the scientific names of illnesses which until then they had patiently endured, so minds are sometimes overwhelmed by an unsettlement of faith that takes the name of philosophic doubt. It is well, then, early in our study, to note the homely, familiar experience, which in most cases underlies and helps to explain the problem of theological unrest.

We all began, as children, with an unlimited ability to believe what we were told. We were credulous long before we became critical. God and Santa Claus, fairy stories and life after death — in what beautiful, unquestioning confusion we received them all! Our thinking was altogether imitative, as our talking was. From the existence of Kamchatka to the opinion that it was wrong to lie, we had no independent knowledge of our own. Reliance on authority was our only road to truth. One prescription was adequate for every need of information: ask our parents and be told.

This situation was the occasion of our first unsettlement of faith: we discovered the fallibility of our parents. They failed to tell us what we asked, or we found to be untrue what they had said, or they themselves confessed how much they did not know. To some this was a shock, the memory of which has never been forgotten. Edmund Gosse, the literary critic, tells us that up to his sixth year he thought that his father knew everything. Then came the fateful crisis when his father wrongly reported an incident which Edmund himself had witnessed. "Nothing could possibly have been more trifling to my parents," he writes, "but to me it meant an epoch. Here was the appalling discovery never suspected before that my father was not as God and did not know everything. The shock was not caused by any suspicion that he was not telling the truth, as it appeared to him, but by the awful proof that he was not, as I had supposed, omniscient." By most of us, however, the transfer of our faith from our parents' authority to some other basis of belief was easily accomplished. We found ourselves resting back on the priest or the church or the creed or the Bible. Still our convictions were not independently our own; we had never fought for them or thought them through; they were founded on the say-so of authority. What we wished to know we asked another, and what was told us we implicitly believed.

The time inevitably comes, however, to a normally developing mind, when such an attitude of unquestioning credulity becomes impossible. The curious "Why?" of the growing child, that began in early years to besiege all statements of fact, now ranges out to call in question the propositions of religious faith. For long-accepted truths, from the rotundity of the earth to the existence of God, the enlarging intellect wants reasons rather than dogmas. So normal is this period of interrogation that it is regularly slated on the timetables of psychological development. Starbuck fixes the average age of the doubt period at about eighteen years for boys and about fifteen for girls.

At whatever time and in whatever special form this period of doubt arises, the characteristic quality of its outcome is easily described. In the end the fully awakened mind is ill content to accept any authoritative statements that it dare not question or deny. It resents having a quotation from any source waved like a revolver in its face with the demand that it throw up its intellectual hands. No more in religion than in politics does it incline to stand before infallibility, like the French peasants before Louis XI, saying, "Sire, what are our opinions?" It claims its right to question everything, to make every truth advance and give the countersign of reasonableness, to weigh all propositions in the scales of its own thinking, and if it is to love the Lord its God at all, to do it, not with all its credulity, but, as Jesus said, with all its mind.

Biography reveals how many of the great believers have passed through this youthful period of rebellion against accepted tradition and have suffered serious religious unsettlement in the process. Robert Browning tells us that as a boy he was "passionately religious." When his period of questioning and revolt arrived, however, it carried him so far that he was publicly rebuked in church for intentional misbehavior, and in his sixteenth year, under the influence of Shelley's "Queen Mab," he declared himself an atheist. But in his "Pauline," written when he was twenty-one, the direction in which his quest was leading him was plain:

And when he grew to his maturity, had left his early credulousness with the revolt that followed it far behind and had used his independent thinking to productive purpose, from what a height of splendid faith did he look back upon that youthful period of storm and stress which he called "the passionate, impatient struggles of a boy toward truth and love"!

Henry Ward Beecher's intellectual revolution was postponed until he had entered the theological seminary. "I was then twenty years old," he writes, "and there came a great revulsion in me from all this inchoate, unregulated, undirected experience. My mind took one tremendous spring over into skepticism, and I said: 'I have been a fool long enough — I will not stir one step further than I can see my way, and I will not stand a moment where I cannot see the truth. I will have something that is sure and steadfast.' Having taken that ground, I was in that state of mind for the larger part of two years." A wholesome restraint upon the wild perversions, the anarchic denials, the abysmal despairs of this period of life is the clear recognition that in some form it is one of the commonest experiences of humanity.

II

The treatment accorded to a youth who is passing through this difficult adjustment often determines, in a fine or lamentable way, their subsequent attitude towards religion. Negative repression of real questions is of all methods the most fatal, whether it be practiced on the youth by others or by the youth upon themselves. "I have not been in church for twenty years," said a college graduate. "Why?" was the inquiry. "Because in college I learned from geology through how many ages this earth was slowly being built. Troubled by the conflict between this new knowledge and my early training, I went to my minister. He said that the Bible told us the earth was made in six days and that I must accept that on faith. That's why." Thousands of people are religious wrecks today because, when the issue was raised in their thinking between their desire for a reason and their traditional beliefs, they were told that to ask a reason is sin. George Eliot's experience unhappily is not unique. Just when in girlhood her mind was waking to independent thought, a book now long unread, Hennell's "Inquiry Concerning the Origin of Christianity," convinced her immature judgment that her early credulity had been blind. No one was at hand to state the faith in a reasonable way or to meet, not by denying but by using her right to think, the attacks of Hennell, which now are forgotten in their futility. She never came through her youthful unsettlement. Years after, F. W. H. Myers wrote: "I remember how at Cambridge I walked with her once in the Fellows' Garden of Trinity, on an evening of rainy May, and she, stirred somewhat beyond her wont, and taking as her text the three words which have been used so often as the inspiring trumpet calls of men — the words God, Immortality, Duty — pronounced with terrible earnestness, how inconceivable was the first, how unbelievable was the second, and how peremptory and absolute the third. Never, perhaps, had sterner accents affirmed the sovereignty of impersonal and unrecompensing law. I listened and night fell; her grave, majestic countenance turned toward me like a Sibyl's in the gloom; it was as though she withdrew from my grasp one by one the two scrolls of promise, and left me the third scroll only, awful with inevitable fate."

In this period of readjustment, whether one is the youth in the midst of the struggle or the solicitous friend endeavoring to help, one most needs a clear perception of the ideal outcome of such intellectual unrest. Let us attempt a picture of that ideal. The youth who long has taken on their parents' say-so the most important convictions that the soul can hold, or who, with no care to think or question for themselves, has looked to Book or Church for all that they believed about God, now feels within that intellectual awakening that cannot be quieted by mere authority. They long have taken their truth preserved by others' hands; now they desire to pick it for themselves, fresh from the living tree of knowledge. Their declaration of independence from subjection to parents or Church is not at first irreverent desire to disbelieve; it is rather desire to enter into the Samaritans' experience when they said to the woman who first had told them about Jesus: "Now we believe, not because of what you said, for we ourselves have heard Him and we know that this is indeed the Christ, the Savior of the world" (John 4:42 NKJV). The youth turns from second-hand rehearsal of the truth to seek a first-hand, original acquaintance with it. As they began in utter financial dependence on their father, then made a bit of spending money of their own, and at last moved out to make a living, ashamed to be a pensioner and parasite when they should be carrying themselves, so from old intellectual dependence the youth passes to a fine responsibility for their own thinking and belief. They know that such transitions, whether financial or intellectual, generally mean stress and perplexity, but if they are to grow, they must venture.

In this transition beliefs will certainly be modified. Not only do forms of religious thinking shift and change with the passing generations, but individuals differ in their powers to see and understand. Religious faith, like water, takes shape from the receptacles into whose unique nooks and crannies it is poured. If the truth which the youth possesses is to be indeed their own, it will surely differ from the truth which once they learned, by as much as their mind and their experience differ from their father's. Even in the New Testament one can easily distinguish James' thought from Paul's and John's from Peter's. But change of form need not mean loss of value. To pass by fine gradations from unquestioning credulity to thoughtful faith is not impossible. Thus a child learns to swim with a parent's hands beneath them and passes so gradually from reliance upon another to independent power to swim alone that they cannot tell when first the old support was quietly withdrawn.

Thus ideally pictured, this transition is nothing to be feared; it is one of life's steps to spiritual power. This period of questioning and venture we have called the passage from credulity to independence, but its significance is deeper than those words imply. It is the passage from hearsay to reality. Of all inward intimate experiences, religion reaches deepest and is least transferable. It is as incommunicable as friendship. A father may commend a comrade to his son and lay bare his own deep friendship with the man, but if the son himself does not see the value there nor for himself in loyalty and love make self-surrender, the father can do nothing more. Friendship cannot be carried on by proxy. One can as easily breathe for another as in another's place be loyal to a friend or trust in God.

When, therefore, the youth moves out from mere dependence on father, Bible, or Church to see and know God in their own right, they are fulfilling the end of all religion. For this their father taught them, for this the Book was written and the Church was founded. As George Macdonald put it, "Each generation must do its own seeking and finding. The father's having found is only the warrant for the children's search." Said Goethe: "What you have inherited from your fathers you must earn for yourself before you can call it yours." This individual experience makes religion real, and the "awkward age" of the spirit when the old security of credulous belief has gone and the new assurance of personal conviction has not yet fully come, is a small price to pay for the sense of reality that enters into religion when a person for themselves knows God. Such is the ideal transition from credulity to independence, from hearsay to reality.

III

One fallacy which disastrously affects many endeavors after this ideal transition is the prejudice that, since faith has until now in the youth's experience meant credulous acceptance of another's say-so, faith always must mean that. Faith and credulity appear identical. In "Alice through the Looking Glass" the Queen asserts that she is a hundred and one years, five months, and one day old. "I can't believe that," said Alice. "Can't you?" said the Queen. "Try again, draw a long breath and shut your eyes." So blind, irrational, and willful does faith seem to many! So far from being an essential part of all real knowledge, therefore, faith seems to stand in direct contrast with knowledge, and this impression is deepened by our common phraseology. Tennyson, for example, sings:

Before there can be any profitable discussion of religious belief, therefore, we need to see that faith is one of the chief ways in which we continually deal with reality; it is a road to truth, without which some truth never can be reached at all. The reason for its inevitableness in life is not our lack of knowledge, but rather that faith is as indispensable as logical demonstration in any real knowing of the world. Behind all other words to be said about our subject lies this fundamental matter: faith is not a substitute for truth, but a pathway to truth; there are realities which without it never can be known.

For one thing, no one can know persons without faith. The world of people, without whom if we could live, we would be, as Aristotle said, either a brute or a god, is closed in its inner meaning to a faithless mind. Entrance into another life with insight and understanding is always a venture of trust. We cry vainly like Cassim before the magic cave, "Open, Barley," if we try to penetrate the secrets of a human personality without sympathy, loyalty, faith. These alone cry "Open, Sesame."

Surely this knowledge of persons, impossible without faith, is as important as any which we possess. While the physical universe furnishes the general background of our existence, the immediate world in which we really live is personal, made up of people whom we fear or love, by whom we are cheered, admonished, hurt, and comforted. "The world is so waste and empty," cried Goethe, "when we figure but towns and hills and rivers in it, but to know that someone is living on it with us, even in silence — this makes our earthly ball a peopled garden." A solitary Robinson Crusoe would give up any other knowledge, if in return he could know even a benighted savage like Friday. But even a savage cannot be known by logical demonstration. Crusoe could so have learned some things, but when he wanted to know Friday, he came by way of adventures in confidence, personal trust and self-commitment, growing reliance and appreciative insight, assured loyalty and faith. He knew whom he had believed.

Moreover, such knowledge of persons is as solid as it is important. That two plus two make four cannot be gainsaid, and doubtless no other kinds of information can be quite so absolute as mathematical theorems. But when one thinks of a comrade, long loved and trusted until they are known through and through, for practical purposes one can think of nothing more stable than that knowledge of a friend. The plain fact is that we do know people, know them well, and that this knowledge never has been or can be a matter of logical demonstration. By taking Arthur Hallam to pieces and analyzing him, the inductive mind might work out all the laws that are involved in Arthur Hallam's constitution; but that mind with all its knowledge would not know Arthur Hallam. Tennyson's "In Memoriam," however, makes clear that knowledge of a friend is not impossible because scientific demonstration cannot supply it. Tennyson knew Hallam well, and this knowledge, far more solid and significant than most other information he possessed, was not achieved by grinding laws out of facts; it came, as all such knowledge comes, by faith.

As one considers what this understanding of the personal world, seen with the open eyes of trust and loyalty, means to us, how assured it is, how it enriches and deepens life, one perceives that here at least faith is something far more than a stop-gap for ignorance, a dream, a fantasy. It is positively a pathway to truth.

There is another realm where faith is our only way of dealing with reality; by it alone can we know the possibilities of individuals and of society. We are well assured now in the United States that the nation can be economically prosperous without slavery. But sixty years ago plenty of people were assured of the contrary, were convinced that if the abolitionists succeeded the country could not economically endure. How did we come by this significant knowledge that the immoral system was dispensable? Not by logical demonstration. The economists of most of our universities logically demonstrated that slavery was essential. Faith was the pathway to the truth. Faith that a new order minus slavery was possible gained adherents, grew in certainty with access of new believers, fed its followers on hopes unrealized but passionately believed in, until faith became experiment, and experiment became experience, and experience brought forth knowledge. The nation trusted and tried. This is the only way to truth in the realm of moral possibilities. If the world were finished, its i's all dotted and its t's all crossed, we might exist on that sort of descriptive science that finds the facts and plots their laws. But the world is in the making; what is actual is not quite so important to us as what is possible; we live, as Wordsworth sings, in

To endeavor to satisfy humanity, therefore, with descriptions of the actual is preposterous. The innermost meaning of personal and social life lies in the contrast between what we are and what we may become. Beyond the achieved present and the demonstrable future, stands the ideal, whose possibility we can never know as a truth without faith enough to try.

When, therefore, one hears disparagement of faith as a poor makeshift for knowledge, a sharp rejoinder is warranted. When has humanity ever found solid knowledge in this most important realm of human possibilities, without faith as the pioneer? We do not know first and then supply by belief what knowledge lacks. We believe first, as Columbus did, and then find new continents because what faith first suggested a great venture has confirmed. When Stephenson proposed to run a steam car forty miles an hour, a host of skeptics proved the feat impossible on the ground that no one could move through the air so rapidly and still survive. If now we know that one easily survives a speed of over a hundred miles an hour in an aeroplane, it is because a faith that saw and dared introduced us to the information. We know now that democracy is not a futile dream, nor the conquest of the air by wireless and of the land by electricity a madman's frenzy; we know truths of highest importance and certainty from the usefulness of radium to the wisdom of religious liberty, and all this knowledge existed as belief in possibility before it became truth in fact. Faith was "the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen" (Hebrews 11:1 NKJV). Faith is no makeshift. Its power is nowhere felt more effectively than in the achievement of knowledge.

IV

So far is faith, then, from being blind credulity, that it alone deserves to be called the Great Discoverer. Everywhere faith goes before as a pioneer and the more prosaic faculties of the mind come after to civilize the newly opened territory. In the evolution of the senses touch developed first. All the knowledge that any creature had concerned the tangible. But in time other senses came. Dimly and uncertainly creatures discerned by hearing and seeing the existence of distant objects. They became aware of presences which as yet they could not touch; they were furnished with clues, in following which they found as real what at first had been intangible. Such a relation faith bears to knowledge. Faith, said Clement of Alexandria, is the "ear of the soul." Said Ruskin, faith is "veracity of insight." By it we hear what as yet we cannot touch and see what the arms of our logic are not long enough to reach.

All the elemental, primary facts of life are faith's discoveries; we have no other means of finding them. By faith we discover our selves. We do not hold back from living until we can prove that we exist. We never can strictly prove that we exist. The very self that we are trying to demonstrate would have to be used in the demonstration. We have no other way of getting at ourselves except to take ourselves for granted — accepting

As Mr. Chesterton remarked, "You cannot call up any wilder vision than a city in which men ask themselves if they have any selves." By faith all of us go out to live as though our selves were real.

By faith we accept the existence of the outer world. We do not restrain ourselves from acting as though the physical world were really there, until we can prove it. We never can strictly prove it; perhaps it is not there at all. When through a microscope an Indian was shown germs in the Ganges' water, to convince him of the peril of its use, he broke the instrument with his cane, as though when the microscope was gone, the facts had vanished too. In his philosophy all that we see is illusion. Perhaps this is true — the world a phantasm and our minds fooling us. But none of us believes it. And we do not believe it because we live by faith — the elemental faith on which all common sense and science rest and without which our thought and work would halt — that our senses and our minds tell us the truth. "It is idle to talk always of the alternative of reason and faith. Reason itself is a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that one's thoughts have any relation to reality at all."

By faith we even discover the universe. We cannot think of the world as a multiverse; we always think of it as having unity, and we do so whether as scientists we talk about the uniformity of nature, or as Christians we speak of one Creator. Not only, however, can no one demonstrate that this is a universe; it positively does not look as though it were. Opposing powers snarl at each other and clash in a disorder that gives to the casual observer not the slightest intimation that any unity is there. Thunder storms and little babies, volcanoes and Easter lilies, immeasurable nebulae in the heavens and people getting married on the earth — what indescribable contrasts and confusions! Still we insist on thinking unity into this seeming anomaly, and out of it we wrest scientific doctrines about the uniformity of law. As Professor James, of Harvard, put it, "The principle of uniformity in nature has to be sought under and in spite of the most rebellious appearances; and our conviction of its truth is far more like religious faith than like assent to a demonstration."

One might suppose that beliefs so assumed and so incapable of adequate demonstration would make the knowledge based upon them insecure. But the fact is that all our surest knowledge is thus based on assumptions that we cannot prove. "As for the strong conviction," Huxley says, "that the cosmic order is rational, and the faith that throughout all duration, unbroken order has reigned in the universe, I not only accept it, but I am disposed to think it the most important of all truths." Faith then, in Huxley's thought, is not a makeshift when knowledge fails. Rather by faith we continually are getting at the most important realities with which we deal. As Professor Ladd, of Yale, impatiently exclaims: "The rankest agnostic is shot through and through with all the same fundamental intellectual beliefs, all the same inescapable rational faiths, about the reality of the self and about the validity of its knowledge. You cannot save science and destroy all faith. You cannot sit on the limb of the tree while you tear it up by the roots."

V

If faith is thus the pioneer that leads us to knowledge of persons and of moral possibilities; if by faith we discover our selves, the outer world's existence and its unity, why should we be surprised that faith is our road to God? Superficial deniers of religion not infrequently seek the discredit of a Christian's trust by saying that God is only a matter of faith. To which the Christian confidently may answer: Of course God is a matter of faith. Faith is always the Great Discoverer.

We find God as we find an earthly friend. We do not go apart in academic solitude to consider the logical rationality of friendship, until, intellectually convinced, we coolly arm ourselves with a Q. E. D. and go out to hunt a comrade. Friendship is never an adventure of logic; it is an adventure of life. It is arrived at by what Emerson called the "untaught sallies of the spirit." We fall in love, it may be with precipitant emotion; our instincts and our wills are first engaged; the whole personality rises up in hunger to claim the affection that it needs and without which life seems unsupportable; faith, hope, and love engage in a glorious venture, where logic plays a minor part. But to make friendship rational, to give it poise, to trace its origins and laws, to clarify, chasten, and direct — this is the necessary work of thought. Faith discovers and reveals; reason furnishes criticism, confirmation, and discipline.

So we find God. We are hungry for Him not in intellect alone, but with all our powers. We feel with Tolstoi: "I remembered that I only lived at those times when I believed in God." We need Him to put sense and worth and hope into life. As with the reality of persons, the validity of knowledge, the unity of the world, so in religion the whole person rises up to claim the truth without which life is barren, meaningless. Our best convictions at the first are all of them insights of the spirit, affirmations of the whole person. But behind, around and through them all play clarifying thoughts, and reasons come to discipline and to confirm. But the reasons by themselves could not have found God. Faith is the Great Discoverer.

Footnotes

¹ Original: "long-suffering" — This archaic term carries a stronger sense of enduring pain and hardship over extended time than the modern "patient." ↩

² Professor Santayana, of Harvard. ↩