Chapter IV — Belief and Trust

Daily Readings

We have tried to explain our faith in the personal God, and to see the transfiguring influence of that faith on life. But is belief in God always such a blessing as we have pictured? Rather faith, like every other experience, has its caricatures and burlesques. Many people are prevented from appreciation of faith in God, with its inestimable blessings, because they have so continually seen faith's perversions. The fact is that belief in God may be an utterly negligible matter in a person's experience or may even become a positively pernicious influence. Let us, in the daily readings, consider some of the familiar travesties on faith.

Fourth Week, First Day

Praise the Lord! Praise the Lord, O my soul! While I live I will praise the Lord; I will sing praises to my God while I have my being. Do not put your trust in princes, nor in a son of man, in whom there is no help. His spirit departs, he returns to his earth; in that very day his plans perish. Happy is he who has the God of Jacob for his help, whose hope is in the Lord his God. —Psalm 146:1–5 (NKJV)

No one can mistake the note of reality in this psalmist's experience of God. But every one of us knows people who, if asked whether they believed in God, would readily assent, yet to whom faith makes no such difference in life as this psalm expresses. Their faith is nothing but an opinion about God, lightly held, a formal consent that what church or family tradition says must be correct. They have what Luther used to call "the charcoal burner's faith." A man of that occupation, when asked what he believed, said, "What Holy Church believes"; but, questioned further, he could not tell what it was that Holy Church did believe. So formal, vitally unpossessed, and practically unreal is much of our religious opinion that passes for faith. Dean Swift was a churchman of high rank, and yet his biographer is compelled to say of him: "He clung to the doctrines of his church, not because he could give abstract reasons for his belief, but simply because the church happened to be his." Vital religious faith is a very different thing from such dry conventionality. A person may assent to the contents of a college catalogue and yet never have experience of college life; they may agree that a menu is dietetically correct and yet never grow strong from the food; and they may believe in every creed in Christendom and not know what faith in God really means. Opinions about God are a roadway to God, but the end of the journey is a personal fellowship that transfigures life; and to seize opinions as though they were the object of faith is, to use Tagore's figure, "like a man who tries to reach his destination by firmly clutching the dust of the road."

O great Father of us all, we rejoice that at last we know You. All our soul within us is glad because we need no longer cringe before You as slaves of holy fear, seeking to appease Your anger by sacrifice and self-inflicted pain, but may come like little children, trustful and happy, to the God of love. You are the only true Father, and all the tender beauty of our human loves is the reflected radiance of Your loving kindness, like the moonlight from the sunlight, and testifies to the eternal passion that kindled it.

Grant us growth of spiritual vision, that with the passing years we may enter into the fullness of this our faith. Since You are our Father, may we not hide our sins from You, but overcome them by the stern comfort of Your presence. By this knowledge uphold us in our sorrows and make us patient even amid the unsolved mysteries of the years. Reveal to us the larger goodness and love that speak through the unbending laws of Your world. Through this faith make us the willing equals of all Your other children.

As You are ever pouring out Your life in sacrificial father-love, may we accept the eternal law of the cross and give ourselves to You and to all people. We praise You for Jesus Christ, whose life has revealed to us this faith and law, and we rejoice that he has become the firstborn among many brethren. Grant that in us, too, the faith in Your fatherhood may shine through all our life with such persuasive beauty that some who still creep in the dusk of fear may stand erect as free children of God, and that others who now through unbelief are living as orphans in an empty world may stretch out their hands to the great Father of their spirits and find You near. Amen. —Walter Rauschenbusch.

Fourth Week, Second Day

Faith is travestied in many lives not so much by the substitution of opinion for experience, as by making religion consist in certain devout practices, such as church-going. Ceremonialism, instead of being an aid in making God real, takes the place of fellowship with God. How scathing were the attacks of the prophets on this distortion of religion!

Hear the word of the Lord, you rulers of Sodom; give ear to the law of our God, you people of Gomorrah: "To what purpose is the multitude of your sacrifices to Me?" says the Lord. "I have had enough of burnt offerings of rams and the fat of fed cattle. I do not delight in the blood of bulls, or of lambs or goats. When you come to appear before Me, who has required this from your hand, to trample My courts? Bring no more futile sacrifices; incense is an abomination to Me. The New Moons, the Sabbaths, and the calling of assemblies — I cannot endure iniquity and the sacred meeting. Your New Moons and your appointed feasts My soul hates; they are a trouble to Me, I am weary of bearing them. When you spread out your hands, I will hide My eyes from you; even though you make many prayers, I will not hear. Your hands are full of blood. Wash yourselves, make yourselves clean; put away the evil of your doings from before My eyes. Cease to do evil, learn to do good; seek justice, rebuke the oppressor; defend the fatherless, plead for the widow." —Isaiah 1:10–17 (NKJV)

Many young people, watching conventional observances in religious worship and perceiving no real life active there, come to the conclusion that religious faith is a decent and negligible formality. So William Scott Palmer, tracing his progress from agnosticism to Christianity, describes the religion of his boyhood: "Religion as a personal matter, religion as a life, did not exist for me or for my family. The border-land of my native village went to church at eleven o'clock on fine Sundays, and I went in and with it. There were unlucky Sundays when the Litany was said, and the service prolonged by its unmeaning length; the lucky Sundays were wet ones that cleared up later.... I did not know that there was any vital meaning in religion." And even Sir Wilfred Grenfell, whose work in Labrador is one of this generation's outstanding triumphs of Christian faith, says of his young manhood: "The ordinary exponents of the Christian faith had never succeeded in interesting me in any way, or even in making me believe that they were more than professionally concerned themselves. Religion appeared to be a profession, exceedingly conventional, and most unattractive in my estimation — the very last I should have thought of selecting." No travesty on faith is more deadly in its effects than this substitution of conventional observance for life.

O Jesus, we Your ministers bow before You to confess the common sins of our calling. You know all things; You know that we love You and that our hearts' desire is to serve You in faithfulness; and yet, like Peter, we have so often failed You in the hour of Your need. If ever we have loved our own leadership and power when we sought to lead our people to You, we pray You to forgive. If we have been engrossed in narrow duties and little questions, when the vast needs of humanity called aloud for prophetic vision and apostolic sympathy, we pray You to forgive. If in our loyalty to the Church of the past we have distrusted Your living voice and have suffered You to pass from our door unheard, we pray You to forgive. If ever we have been more concerned for the strong and the rich than for the shepherdless throngs of the people for whom Your soul grieved, we pray You to forgive.

O Master, amidst our failures we cast ourselves upon You in humility and contrition. We need new light and a new message. We need the ancient spirit of prophecy and the leaping fire and joy of a new conviction, and You alone can give it. Inspire the ministry of Your Church with dauntless courage to face the vast needs of the future. Free us from all entanglements that have hushed our voice and bound our action. Grant us grace to look upon the veiled sins of the rich and the coarse vices of the poor through Your eyes. Give us Your inflexible sternness against sin, and Your inexhaustible compassion for the frailty and tragedy of those who do the sin. Make us faithful shepherds of Your flock, true seers of God, and true followers of Jesus. Amen. —Walter Rauschenbusch.

Fourth Week, Third Day

Also He spoke this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous, and despised others: "Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee stood and prayed thus with himself, 'God, I thank You that I am not like other men — extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even as this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I give tithes of all that I possess.' And the tax collector, standing afar off, would not so much as raise his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast, saying, 'God, be merciful to me a sinner!' I tell you, this man went down to his house justified rather than the other; for everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted." —Luke 18:9–14 (NKJV)

The people against whom the Master directed this parable were bigots. Self-opinionated, self-conceited, dogmatic, and contemptuous — they wore all the attributes of bigotry. And bigotry is a very familiar perversion of faith. Vital fellowship with God ought to make people gracious, magnanimous, generous; it ought to make life with God seem so incomparably important that when anyone has that, their opinions about God will be tolerantly regarded, however mistaken they may appear to be. Dr. Pritchett, when President of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, passed through a classroom where a young instructor was conducting a chemical experiment. "The reaction itself," says Dr. Pritchett, "was going on in a retort on the table, while on a blackboard was written the conventional formula, which in the science of chemistry is used to describe the reaction. It so happened that the instructor had made a mistake in writing the formula; instead of CO₂ he had written CO₃. But this made not the slightest difference in the reaction which was going on in the flask." So, a person may live with an admirably Christian spirit, although they describe it with a mistaken formula. The error is theoretical, not vital. But a bigot is so sure that they alone know the true formula, that a person without that formula is altogether wrong, and that they must either set them right or condemn them utterly, that they grow bitter, hard, unlovely. Their opinions may be right, but their spirit is wrong. The faith that should make their life radiant is perverted to make it narrow, harsh, contemptuous. They render hateful the very faith they seek to commend and ruin the reputation of the God whom they are zealous to exalt. So the Pharisee of the parable missed all the beauty of the Publican's life because he thought the Publican's formula was wrong. No one can estimate the irreparable damage which zealous bigots have done to true faith.

O You who are of purer eyes than to behold iniquity, can You bear to look on us conscious of our great transgression? Yet hide not Your face from us, for in Your light alone shall we see light.

Forgive us for the sins which crowd into the mind as we realize Your presence; our ungovernable tempers, our shuffling insincerities, the craven fear of our hearts, the pettiness of our spirits, the foul lusts and fatal leanings of our souls. Not for pardon only, but for cleansing, Lord, we pray.

Forgive us, we ask You, our unconscious sins; things which must be awful to Your sight, of which we yet know nothing. Forgive by giving us in fuller measure the awakening of Your presence, that we may know ourselves, and lose all love of sin in the knowledge of what You are.

Forgive us for the things for which we can never forgive ourselves; those sad turned pages of our life which some chance wind of memory blows back again with shame; for the moment of cruel passion, the hour beyond recall, the word that went forth to poison and defame, the carelessness that lost our opportunity, the unheeded fading of bright ideals.

Forgive us for the things that others can never forgive; the idle tale, the cruel wrong, the uncharitable condemnation, the unfair judgment, the careless criticism, the irresponsible conduct.

Forgive us for the sins of our holy things; that we have turned the sacred page without a sigh, read the confessions of holy men and women and never joined therein, lived in Your light and never prayed to be forgiven or rendered You thanksgiving; professed to believe in You and love You, yet dared to injure and hate.

Nothing save being born again, nothing but a miracle of grace, can ever be to us forgiveness. Cleanse our hearts, renew our minds, and take not Your Holy Spirit from us. Amen. —W. E. Orchard.

Fourth Week, Fourth Day

Of all perversions of faith none is more fatal than the substitution of opinions about God for integrity of character and usefulness of life. With what scathing vehemence does James, as Dr. Moffatt renders him, attack this travesty on faith.

"My brothers, what is the use of anyone declaring he has faith, if he has no deeds to show? Can his faith save him? Suppose some brother or sister is ill-clad and short of daily food; if any of you says to them, 'Depart in peace! Get warm, get food,' without supplying their bodily needs, what use is that? So faith, unless it has deeds, is dead in itself. Someone will object, 'And you claim to have faith!' Yes, and I claim to have deeds as well; you show me your faith without any deeds, and I will show you by my deeds what faith is! You believe in one God? Well and good. So do the devils, and they shudder. But will you understand, you senseless fellow, that faith without deeds is dead? When our father Abraham offered his son Isaac on the altar, was he not justified by what he did?" —James 2:14–21 (Moffatt translation)

An American business man not long dead, who hated any word from the pulpit about social righteousness, used to complain: "Preachers are talking so everlastingly about this earth. I've done my best to get them to stick to the Gospel, and not allow 'worldliness' to get into the teachings of the Church; but the good old preachers have gone to glory." Yet this pious zealot helped wreck the finances of a great railroad system, and with part of the proceeds built a theological seminary. There was no vital, intelligent connection between his faith in God and his ideals of character and service. One verse should be made to flame in Christian pulpits: "But if anyone does not provide for his own, and especially for those of his household, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever" (1 Timothy 5:8 NKJV). Domestic fidelity is here only typical of all basic moral obligations. What this verse says in principle is clear: theoretical unbelief is not the worst sin in God's sight; anyone who fails in the fundamental duties of rectitude and service has thereby denied the faith and is worse than an atheist.

O holy One and just! If only the pure in heart can see You, truly we must stand far off, and not so much as lift up our eyes to heaven. Were it not that You have help and pity for the contrite spirit, we could only cry, "Depart from us, we are sinful, O Lord!" For idle words, for proud thoughts and unloving deeds; for wasted moments and reluctant duties, and too eager rest; for the wandering desire, the vain fancy, the scornful doubt, the untrustful care; for impatient murmurs, and unruly passions, and the hardness of a worldly heart; You, Lord, can call us to judgment, and we have nothing to answer You. But, O Judge of all, You are witness that we do not love our guilty ways; make our conscience true and tender that we may rightly hate them, and refuse them any peace as enemies to You. Stir up within us a great and effectual repentance that we may redeem the time which we have lost, and in the hours that remain may do the work of many days. You know all our secret snares; drive from us every root of bitterness: with Your severity pluck out, O Lord, the thorns of sin from our entangled souls, and bind them as a crown of contrition around our bleeding brows; and having made our peace with You may we henceforth watch and pray that we enter not again into temptation, but bear our cross with patience to the close. Amen. —James Martineau.

Fourth Week, Fifth Day

Some of the most lamentable perversions of religious faith arise from inadequate ideas of God. Consider, for example, the way Manasseh thought that the Divine ought to be worshiped.

For he rebuilt the high places which Hezekiah his father had destroyed; he raised up altars for Baal, and made a wooden image, as Ahab king of Israel had done; and he worshiped all the host of heaven and served them. He also built altars in the house of the Lord, of which the Lord had said, "In Jerusalem I will put My name." And he built altars for all the host of heaven in the two courts of the house of the Lord. Also he made his son pass through the fire, practiced soothsaying, used witchcraft, and consulted spiritists and mediums. He did much evil in the sight of the Lord, to provoke Him to anger. —2 Kings 21:3–6 (NKJV)

Then compare the thought of the Master on the same subject.

"But the hour is coming, and now is, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth; for the Father is seeking such to worship Him. God is Spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth." —John 4:23–24 (NKJV)

There is no reason to suppose that Manasseh was insincere; he is one of an innumerable company in whom the religious motive has been harnessed to warped and ignorant ideas of God. Religious faith, like any other tremendous power, is terrific in evil consequences when it goes wrong. People, under its subtle and prevailing influence, have waged bloody wars, worshiped with licentious rituals, carried on pitiless persecutions, and in bigotry, cruelty, and deceit have grown worse than they would have been with no religion whatsoever. And people, in its inspiring light, have launched missionary movements, founded great philanthropies, built schools, hospitals, orphanages, and in sacrifice, courageous service, and hope of human brotherhood have made history glorious. Religion needs intelligence to save it from becoming a ruinous curse; like all power of the first magnitude it is a disaster if ignorantly used. Since religious faith will always be a major human motive, what obligations rest upon us to save it from perversion and to keep it clean and right!

Almighty God, our heavenly Father, we are most unworthy to be called Your children; for when light and darkness have been set before us, we have often chosen darkness rather than light. Conscious that within us are the elements of a nobler and a meaner life, we have yet given way to the meaner appetites, and have not obeyed the inspiration You have kindled within us. We entreat You now of Your grace to call us back from the ways of temptation and sin into that higher life which You breathe upon us, and which is manifested in Jesus Christ our Lord. Give us the self-knowledge, the humility, the repentance, the aspiration which draw us to the Cross of Christ, that worshiping there in lowliness, we may see the weakness of falsehood and the strength of truth, the exceeding sinfulness of selfishness, and the beauty of love and sacrifice.

O You whose secret is with those who fear You, inspire us with that loyalty of soul, that willingness to do Your will to which all things are clear. Darkness, we know, comes upon the proud and disobedient; confusion is ever attendant upon self-will; while to the humble, the earnest, and the pure-minded, the way of duty and spiritual health is made clear. O Spirit of the Eternal, subdue within us all pride, all vainglory, all self-seeking, and bring every thought and every desire into obedience to the law of Christ our Lord.

Almighty Father, to You would we consecrate these earthly days from infancy to age. You would we remember in childhood and youth. You would we serve in all the relations and activities of middle age. You would we teach our children to love and serve. Be our stay and hope when health and strength shall fail. And when we are summoned hence, do You, O Life of our life, illumine the mystery of the invisible world with Your presence and love. We ask these blessings in the spirit of Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. —John Hunter.

Fourth Week, Sixth Day

The perversions of religious faith, working pitiable instead of benevolent consequences, are often seen on mission fields. Consider Paul's address in Athens:

Then Paul stood in the midst of the Areopagus and said, "Men of Athens, I perceive that in all things you are very religious; for as I was passing through and considering the objects of your worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: TO THE UNKNOWN GOD. Therefore, the One whom you worship without knowing, Him I proclaim to you: God, who made the world and everything in it, since He is Lord of heaven and earth, does not dwell in temples made with hands. Nor is He worshiped with men's hands, as though He needed anything, since He gives to all life, breath, and all things. And He has made from one blood every nation of men to dwell on all the face of the earth, and has determined their preappointed times and the boundaries of their dwellings, so that they should seek the Lord, in the hope that they might grope for Him and find Him, though He is not far from each one of us; for in Him we live and move and have our being, as also some of your own poets have said, 'For we are also His offspring.'" —Acts 17:22–28 (NKJV)

Paul did not need to plead for religion with the Athenians; they were already "very religious." Only religion was not doing for them what it ought; it was a power used "in ignorance"; and Paul, valuing all that was good there, quoting their own poets with appreciation, nevertheless longed to take their strong religious motives and so clarify and direct them that faith might mean unqualified benediction. Is not this always the right missionary method? The people of India are intensely religious; no tribe in Africa lacks its gods; and everywhere the faith-motive is immensely powerful. But often it makes mothers drown their babies in sacred rivers, it consecrates caste systems as holy things, it centers adoration around unworthy objects, its powers, gone wrong, are a curse and not a blessing. If in Jesus Christ religious faith has come to us, through no merit of our own, as an unspeakable benediction, ought we not, humbly, without dogmatism or intolerance, and yet with passionate earnestness, to share our best with all the world? Religious faith may either depress or lift a people's life; it is forever doing one or the other in every nation under heaven; and there is no hope for the world until this master-motive is lifting everywhere.

Almighty God, our Father in heaven, who has so greatly loved the world that You have given Your only-begotten Son, the Redeemer, communicate Your love to the hearts of all believers, and revive Your Church to preach the Gospel to every creature.

O You who rules by Your providence over land and sea, defend and guide and bless the messengers of Christ; in danger be their shield, in darkness be their hope; enrich their word and work with wisdom, joy, and power, and let them gather souls for You in far fields white unto the harvest.

O You who by Your Holy Spirit works wonders in secret, open the eyes that dimly look for light to see the day-star in Christ; open the minds that seek the unknown God to know their Heavenly Father in Christ; open the hearts that hunger for righteousness to find eternal peace in Christ. Deliver the poor prisoners of ignorance and captives of idolatry, break down the bars of error, and dispel the shadows of the ancient night; lift up the gates, and let the King of glory and the Prince of Peace come in.

Your kingdom, O Christ, is an everlasting kingdom! Strengthen Your servants to pray and labor and wait for its appearing; forgive our little faith and the weakness of our endeavor; hasten the day when all nations shall be at peace in You, and every land and every heart throughout the world shall bless the name of the Lord Jesus, to the glory of God the Father. Amen. —Henry van Dyke.

Fourth Week, Seventh Day

The sad perversions of religious faith are not a matter for foreign missions only. At home, too, we find people who seem to be rather worse than better because they are religious. Just as power in any other form may be abused, so may religious faith. Some in the name of religion become censorious and intolerant, some superstitious, some slaves to morbid fears; and ignorance, self-conceit, pride, and worldly ambition when driven and enforced by a religious motive are infinitely worse than they would have been without it. Toward this fact two attitudes are possible. One is to throw over religion on account of its abuses; which is as reasonable as to deny all the blessings of electricity because in ignorant hands it is a dangerous power. The other is to take religious faith more seriously than ever, to see how great a force for good or ill it always is in human life, and to strive in ourselves and in others for a high, intelligent, and worthy understanding and use of it. For religion can mean what Amiel said of it: "There is but one thing needful — to possess God. Religion is not a method: it is a life — a higher and supernatural life, mystical in its root and practical in its fruits; a communion with God, a calm and deep enthusiasm, a love which radiates, a force which acts, a happiness which overflows." From our study of the perversions and travesties of faith, we turn therefore in the weekly comment to consider faith's vital meanings. So Paul, writing to the Galatians, rejoices in religion as a gloriously transforming power in life.

I say then: Walk in the Spirit, and you shall not fulfill the lust of the flesh. For the flesh lusts against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh; and these are contrary to one another, so that you do not do the things that you wish. But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the law. Now the works of the flesh are evident, which are: adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lewdness, idolatry, sorcery, hatred, contentions, jealousies, outbursts of wrath, selfish ambitions, dissensions, heresies, envy, murders, drunkenness, revelries, and the like; of which I tell you beforehand, just as I also told you in time past, that those who practice such things will not inherit the kingdom of God. But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. Against such there is no law. And those who are Christ's have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. —Galatians 5:16–24 (NKJV)

You, O God, have exalted us so that no longer do we walk with lowered head among the animals that perish. You have ordained us as Your own children, and have planted within us that spiritual life which ever seeks, as the flame, to rise upward and mingle with You. Every exaltation, every pure sentiment, all urgency of true affection, and all yearning after things higher and nobler, are testimonies of the divinity that is in us. These are the threads by which You are drawing us away from sense, away from the earth, away from things coarse and unspiritual, and toward the ineffable. We rejoice that we have in us the witness of the Spirit, the indwelling of God. For, although we are temples defiled, though we are unworthy of such a Guest, and though we perpetually grieve You, and drive You from us, so that You cannot do the mighty work that You would within us, yet we rejoice to believe that You linger near us. Even upon the outside, You stand knocking at the door until Your locks are wet with the night dews, and persuade us with the everlasting importunity of love, and draw us upward, whether with or without our own knowledge. You are evermore striving to fill us with Yourself, and to give us that divine nature which shall triumph over time and sense and matter; and we pray that we may have an enlightened understanding of this Your work in us and upon us, and work together with You. Amen. —Henry Ward Beecher.

Comment for the Week

I

One might be tempted by the last chapter to suppose that, if one could accept the proposition that God is personal, they would be well upon their way toward Christianity. But in theory at least Plato accepted this proposition four hundred years before Christ, when he said: "God is never in any way unrighteous — He is perfect righteousness; and he of us who is most righteous is most like Him." He, too, used personality as a symbol of God. When, however, one compares Plato with Jesus, how incalculably greater is the religious meaning of our Lord! There is something more in the Master's experience and thought than the belief that God is personal. Evidently our quest must be followed further than the last chapter carried us.

In Scripture two kinds of faith in the personal God are clearly indicated. On the one side stand verses such as this: "You believe that there is one God. You do well. Even the demons believe — and tremble!" (James 2:19 NKJV). On the other, one finds through both the Testaments witness and appeal for a kind of faith that plainly differs from the first: "O my God, in You I trust" (Psalm 25:2 NKJV). It is not difficult to guess the terms in which many would describe this difference. In the first, so the familiar explanation runs, we are dealing with the mind's faith in God; the intellect assents to the belief that God is and that He is one. In the second we are dealing with the heart's faith in God; the whole person is here involved in an adoring trust that finds in reliance upon God life's stimulus and joy.

This distinction between the faith of the intellect and of the heart is valid, but it does not go to the pith of the truth. When a professor in the classroom, discussing conflicting theories of life's origin, concludes that theism is the reasonable interpretation of the universe, the listener understands that the lecturer believes in God's existence. But if the professor could be followed home and overheard in a private prayer, like Fénelon's: "Lord, I know not what I ought to ask of You; You only know what I need; You love me better than I know how to love myself. O Father! give to Your child that which he himself knows not how to ask," something incalculably more than the classroom talk disclosed would be revealed about the meaning of the teacher's faith. And as the classroom lecture and the private prayer stand so contrasted, the gist of the difference is plain. In the one, faith was directed toward a theory; in the other faith laid hold upon a Person. That the intellect was more involved in the first and the emotions in the second is incidental to the main matter, that two differing objects were in view. Toward these two objects we continually are exercising faith — ideas and people, propositions and persons.

Now faith in a proposition we conveniently may call belief; and faith in a person, trust. We believe that gravitation and the conservation of energy universally apply, that democracy will prove better than absolutism, and that prison systems can be radically reformed; these and innumerable other propositions that cannot be demonstrated we confidently believe. But in quite another way we daily are exercising faith; we have faith in our friends. How profound a change comes over the quality and value of faith when it thus finds its objective in a person! Our beliefs in propositions are of basic importance and without them we could not well exist, but it is by trust in persons that we live indeed. Belief in monogamy, for all its importance, is a cold abstraction, and few could be found to die for it. People do not lay down their lives for abstract theories, any more than they would suffer martyrdom, as Chesterton remarked, for the Meridian of Greenwich. But when monogamy is translated from theory into personal experience, when belief in the idea becomes trust in a life-long comrade of whom one may sing:

faith has taken a form for which people do live and die in glad surrender. Although the same word, faith, be applied to both, trust in persons reaches deeper than belief in propositions and supplies a warmth and power that belief cannot attain.

In religion these two aspects of faith continually are found and both are indispensable. Trust in a person, for example, presupposes belief in his existence and fidelity. "He who comes to God must believe that He is, and that He is a rewarder of those who diligently seek Him" (Hebrews 11:6 NKJV). Trust cannot exist without belief, but when one seeks the inner glory of the religious life that has overflowed in prayer and hymn, supplied motive for service and power for character, one finds it not in belief, but in the vital relationships involved in trusting a Person. People often have discussed their particular beliefs with cool deliberation, have stated them in formal creeds, have changed them with access of new knowledge and experience. But trust, the inner reliance of the soul on God and glad self-surrender to His will, has persisted through many changes, clothing itself with beliefs like garments and casting them aside when old. Trust has made rituals and churches and unmade them when they were ineffectual, it has been the life behind the theory, the experience behind the explanation; and its proper voice has been not creed and controversy, but psalm and song and sacrifice. People have felt in describing this inward friendship that their best words were but the "vocal gestures of the dumb," able to indicate but unable to express their thoughts. For while belief is theology, trust is religion.

II

This central position of trust in the Christian life is evident when one considers that in its presence or absence lies the chief point of difference between a religious and an irreligious person. The peculiarity of religion is not that it has beliefs; everybody has them. As we have seen, Huxley, who called himself an agnostic, said that he thoroughly believed the universe to be rational, than which only a few greater ventures of faith can be imagined. A person may not want to have beliefs. They may say that knowledge is wool, warm to clothe oneself with, that belief is cotton, and that they will not mingle them. But for all that they still do have beliefs and cannot help it.

When, therefore, a Christian and an atheist converse they can match belief with belief. "I believe," says one, "in God the Father"; and "I believe," says the other, "in the eternal physical universe, without spiritual origin or moral purpose." Says the Christian, "I believe in the immortality of persons," and the atheist replies, "I believe that the spirit dies with the body as sound ceases when the bell's swinging iron grows still." Says the Christian, "I believe in the ultimate triumph of righteousness"; and the atheist replies, "I believe that all human aspiration after good is but the endless sailing of a ship that never shall arrive." So the two may play battledore and shuttlecock, but if, so having paired beliefs, they part with no more said, they have missed the real point of their difference. The irreligious person can match the Christian's belief with their own, but one thing they cannot match — the Christian's trust. They have nothing that remotely corresponds with that.

The Christian always has this case to plead with an unbelieving person: Do not suppose that the difference between us is exhausted in a conflict of contrasting propositions. Great indeed is the divergence there! But the issue of all such difference lies in another realm. When you face life's abysmal mysteries that your eyes can no more pierce than mine, you have no one to trust. When misfortunes fall that send people to their graves, as Sydney Smith said, with souls scarred like a soldier's body, you have no one to trust. When you face the last mystery of all and whether going say farewell to those who stay, or staying bid farewell to those who go, you have no one to trust. You can match my belief with your belief, but for one thing you have no counterpart. "The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want" (Psalm 23:1 NKJV). You cannot match that! "My heart trusted in Him, and I am helped" (Psalm 28:7 NKJV). You cannot match that! "Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?" (Genesis 18:25 NKJV); "We trust in the living God" (1 Timothy 4:10 NKJV); "Father, into Your hands I commit My spirit" (Luke 23:46 NKJV). That trust you cannot match!

III

In the light of this distinction between belief and trust some mistaken types of faith can be easily described. There, for example, is the faith of formal creedalism. We cannot have trust without some belief, but we may unhappily have belief without any trust. Now a person who believes the doctrines that underlie the Christian life but who does not vitally trust the Person whom those doctrines present, has missed the heart out of faith's meaning. They are like one who cherishes a letter of introduction to a great personality, but has never used it; they have the formal credentials, but not the transforming experience. It follows that we cannot estimate a person merely by knowing their beliefs. I believe in all the Christian truths, says one; and the curious question rises, how did these beliefs come into their possession? They may have been handed to them by forbears like a set of family jewels, a static and external heritage, which now they keep in some ecclesiastical safe-deposit vault and on state days, at Christmas or at Easter, go to see. Still they may claim that they are their beliefs; they may even quarrel about their genuineness, not because they ever use them but because they are theirs. They may repeat the creed with the same unquestioning assent that they give to the conventional cut of their clothes. Their beliefs are not the natural utterance and explanation of their inner life with God and humanity, but are put on as they were handed to them, like the fashions of their coats. So easy is it to be formally orthodox!

Over against such conventional believers one thinks of other folk. They have no such stereotyped, clear-cut beliefs. They are very puzzled about life. It seems to them abysmally mysterious. And when they speak they talk with a modesty the formal creedalist has never felt: My beliefs are most uncertain. Confused by many voices shouting conflicting opinions about truths which I once accepted without thinking, I cannot easily define my thoughts. But I do trust God. That assent of the mind which I cannot give to propositions, I can give to Him. Life is full of mystery, but I do not really think that the mystery is darkness at its heart. My faith has yet its standing ground in this, that the world's activities are not like the convulsions of an epileptic, unconscious and purposeless. There is a Mind behind the universe, and a good purpose in it.

Say as one may that such an attitude is far from adequate, yet as compared with the merely formal acceptance of inherited opinions how incomparably superior its religious value is!

The people of placid, stiff beliefs are not the successors of the real saints. When one reads George Matheson's books of devotion, for example, or sings his hymn "O Love, that wilt not let me go," or learns of his great work in his church in Edinburgh, one might suppose that he never had a doubt. Yet listen to his own confession: "At one time with a great thrill of horror, I found myself an absolute atheist. After being ordained at Innellan, I believed nothing; neither God nor immortality. I tendered my resignation to the Presbytery, but to their honor they would not accept it, even though an Highland Presbytery. They said I was a young man and would change. I have changed." One need only read such books of his as "Can the Old Faith Live with the New?" to see through what a searching discipline of strenuous thought he passed in the regaining of his faith. But if one would know what held his religious life secure while he was working out his beliefs from confusion to clarity, one must turn to Matheson's poem:

Many a person has been held fast by their trust in God while in perplexity they thought out their beliefs about God.

Indeed, within the Scripture, whatever word is used to describe the attitude of faith, this vital personal alliance with God is everywhere intended. For convenience we have called faith in propositions belief, but that does not mean that when the Scriptures use "believe" they are urging the acceptance of propositions. Not often in the Bible are we invited merely to agree with an opinion; we are everywhere called to trust a Person. "Trust in the Lord" in the Old Testament, "Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ" in the New, are neither of them the proclamation of a theory, but the exaltation of a personality. Wherever in Scripture doctrines are insisted on — the unity of God, the deathlessness of the spirit, the divinity of Christ — they are never doctrines for their own sakes; they are either commendatory truths about a Friend, that we may not fail to trust Him, or they are ideas about life that have come to people because they did trust Him. Trust in a Person is either the source or the goal of every Christian doctrine. The Gospel at its center is not a series of propositions, but a concrete, personal relationship opened between the soul and the Divine, out of which new powers, joys, possibilities flow gloriously into human life. When out of this experience of divine fellowship Paul, for example, speaks of faith he means by it the alliance that binds him to his friend. He fairly sings of the peace that comes from such believing (Romans 15:13), of the love that is its motive power and chief expression (Galatians 5:6), and of "the sacrifice and service" which are its issue (Philippians 2:17). He enthusiastically commends to everyone this divine alliance through which moral defeat is changed to victory in the "righteousness which is from God by faith" (Philippians 3:9 NKJV); and his prose slips over into poetry when he describes his new transfigured life as "access by faith into this grace in which we stand" (Romans 5:2 NKJV). Plainly he is not talking here about a set of propositions; he is rejoicing in a transforming personal relationship. Some faith is nothing but an inherited set of opinions and it gives a cold light like an incandescent bulb; some faith, like sunshine, is brighter for seeing than any incandescence can ever be, but warm too, so that under its persuasive touch new worlds of life spring into being. The faith of the New Testament and of the real saints is not the cold brilliance of a creed in whose presence one can freeze even while seeing; it is the warm, life-giving sunshine of a trust in God that makes all gracious things grow, and puts peace and joy, hope and love into life. Belief in propositions is there, but the crown and glory of it are trust in a Person.

IV

In the light of this distinction between belief and trust, the inadequacy of another type of faith can easily be understood. Many would protest that they have not accepted their beliefs as an external heritage from the past, but rather have thought them through, and hold them now as reasonable theories to explain the facts of the spiritual life. They would say that as a geologist observes the rocks and constructs an hypothesis to account for their origin and nature, so the mind, observing our contacts with invisible powers, constructs religious beliefs as explanations of experience. They would insist that their theology is not merely traditional, but in large degree is independently appropriated and original. They hold it as an hypothesis to make intelligible our experiences of the spiritual world.

There is significant truth in this view of faith. Our ideals, our loves, hopes, aspirations, our inescapable sense of moral obligation, our consciousness of Someone other than ourselves, are facts, as solidly present in experience as stars and mountains. To explain these facts by theology is as rational as to explain the stars by astronomy. Every believer in religious truth should welcome this confirming word from Dr. Pritchett, written when he was President of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology: "Science is grounded in faith just as is religion, and scientific truth, like religious truth, consists of hypotheses, never wholly verified, that fit the facts more or less closely."

But when one turns from such a statement to inquire what faith has actually meant to religious people, one does not find that their experience could easily be defined as belief in an hypothesis. The prophets, standing their ground through national disaster, undiscourageable in their conviction of God's good purpose for His people, would have been surprised to hear their faith so described. When the Sons of Thunder were swept out into a new life by the influence of Jesus, or the seer of Patmos was ravished with visions of eternal victory, or Paul was made conqueror in a fight for character that had been his despair, they would hardly have spoken of their experiences as belief in an hypothesis. Real religion has always meant something more vital than holding a theory about life. When Robert Louis Stevenson says of his transformation of character, "I came about like a well-handled ship. There stood at the wheel that unknown steersman whom we call God"; when Tolstoi cries: "To know God and to live are one and the same thing"; when Professor William James, of Harvard, writes of his consciousness of God, "It is most indefinite to be sure and rather faint, and yet I know that if it should cease, there would be a great hush, a great void in my life"; one sees what conversion of character, what increase of life's value, what spiritual reinforcement religion has meant even to such unconventional believers. When they speak of it, they are evidently thinking of a vital power and not a theory.

The most obscure Christian to whom religion has become a necessity in living, knows how far short the plummet of hypothetical belief comes from reaching bottom. In sin, burdened by a sense of guilt that could not be shaken off and unable to forgive themselves, they have cried to be forgiven, and the Gospel that has been their hope was no injunction to hold hard by their hypothesis! In sorrow, when the blows have fallen that either hallow or embitter life, they have sought for necessary fortitude, and the Gospel which established them certainly was not, Cast your care on your hypothesis! And when, more than conqueror, they face death, their confidence and hope will rest on no such prayer as this, O Hypothesis, guide me! The word of religion is of another sort, "Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for You are with me" (Psalm 23:4 NKJV). Not belief in propositions, but trust in a Person has been the heart of the Gospel, and to make any hypothesis, however true, do duty as religion is to give the soul a stone when it asks for bread.

The futility of seeking contentment in faith as an hypothesis alone is especially manifest in our time. This is an age of swiftly changing ideas in every realm. As in science, so in religion, today one theory holds the field to be displaced tomorrow by another. A person in theology, as much as in politics or psychology, goes to bed supposing they have settled their opinions, and wakes up to find a new array of evidence that disturbs their confidence. When, therefore, religious faith has meant no more to its possessor than theory, there is no security or rest. Each day the winds of opinion shift and veer, and minds at the beginning obstinate in their beliefs, at last, dismayed by the reiterated uncertainties of thought, give up their faith.

Where, then, have the people of faith found the immovable center of their confidence? Paul revealed the secret. On the side of his particular opinions he frankly confessed his limited and uncertain knowledge. "For now we see in a mirror, dimly," he wrote (1 Corinthians 13:12 NKJV). "Oh, the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are His judgments and His ways past finding out!" (Romans 11:33 NKJV). But on the side of his trust he is adamant: "I know whom I have believed" (2 Timothy 1:12 NKJV). The certainty of his life was his relationship with a person, and his beliefs were the best he yet had thought in the explication and establishment of that trust.

The great believers of the Church continually have exhibited this dual aspect of their faith. Even St. Augustine, facing the profound mysteries involved in his trinitarian belief, complains that human speech is pitiably futile in trying to explain what "Three persons" means, and that if he uses the familiar phrase, he does so not because he likes it, but because he may not be silent and knows no better thing to say. But when Augustine prays to the God whose nature is so unfathomable that no one can see it fully or express it adequately, he reveals no such uncertain thought: "Grant me, even me, my dearest Lord, to know You and love You and rejoice in You.... Let the love of You grow every day more and more here, that it may be perfect hereafter; that my joy may be great in itself and full in You. I know, O God, that You are a God of truth; O make good Your gracious promises to me!" So children do not fully understand an earthly father and often hold conceptions grotesquely insufficient to do justice to his life and work. But they may have for him well-founded trust. Even in the years of infancy an ennobling personal relationship begins, despite the inadequacy of their beliefs, and that trust yearly deepens while mental concepts shift and change with access of new knowledge. The abiding core of a child's life with their father is not belief but trust.

Such has always been the secret of faith's stability in people who have entered into personal fellowship with God. Even of the first disciples it has been said — "They would have had difficulty sometimes to tell you what they believed, but they could always have told you in whom they believed."

V

The truth of which we have been speaking has pertinent bearing on the main object of our studies. We shall be considering the difficulties which Christians have with their beliefs, and the arguments which may clarify and establish our minds' confidence in God. But many problems in the realm of intellectual belief cannot be solved by any arguments which the mind devises. The trouble often lies not in our theories about the religious life, but in our religious life itself. The deeper difficulty is not that our thinking is unreasonable, but that our experience is unreal.

To a person who had never seen the stars or felt the wonder of their distances, astronomy would be a lifeless topic and their endeavors to think about it a blundering and futile operation. Our theories about anything depend for their interest and worth upon the vividness with which we experience the thing itself and care to understand its meaning. This is true about matters like the stars; how much more true about the intimate affairs of our own life! Democracy vs. autocracy is a crucial problem. But plenty of people are so careless about human welfare, think so little of their country and the world as objects of solicitude and devotion, that to discuss in their presence democratic and autocratic theories of state is a waste of time. The trouble is not with their minds; they may be very clever and acute. The trouble is with their lives. They need to experience patriotism as a vital motive; they need to care immensely what happens to humanity. Only then will the problems of government grow vivid, and the need of a solution become so critical that thinking will be urgent and productive. We never think well about anything for which we do not care.

Plenty of people today discuss theology as an academic pastime. It is a speculative game at which they play, as they do at golf, for its fun and lure. They do not really care about God; they feel no crucial need of Him. Of little use is all their ingenuity in argument, clever and astute though it may be. Blind people might so discuss the color scheme of an Italian landscape and deaf people debate the harmonies of Handel's oratorios. What is lacking is experience. For our theories are only the explanations of experience, and an emptier game cannot be played than debating explanations of experiences which we have not had.

Everyone in difficulty with their faith should give due weight to this important truth. Our intellectual troubles are not all caused by the bankruptcy of our spiritual lives, but many of them are. People live with drained and unreplenished spirits, from which communion with God and service of high causes have been crowded out. God grows unreal. The self-evidencing experiences that maintain vital confidence in the spiritual life grow dim and unimperative. People pass years without habitually thinking as though God really were, without making any great decisions as though God's will were King, without engaging in any sacrificial work that makes the thought of God a need and a delight, without the companionship of great ideas or the sustenance of prayer. Then, when experience is denuded of any sense of God's reality, some intellectual doubt is suggested by books or friends, or fearful trouble shatters happiness. What recourse is there in such a case? The arguments of faith have no experience to get their grip upon; they can appeal to no solid and sustained fact of living. Religious confidence goes to pieces and people tell their friends that modern philosophy has been too much for faith. But the underlying difficulty was not philosophical; it was vital. The insolvency of "belief" was due to the bankruptcy of "trust." Personal fellowship with God failed first; the theory about Him lapsed afterward.

Throughout our endeavor to deal with intellectual perplexity, this fundamental truth should not be forgotten. The peril of religion is that vital experience shall be resolved into a formula of explanation, and that people, grasping the formula, shall suppose themselves thereby to possess the experience. If one inquires what air is, the answer will probably be a formula stating that oxygen and nitrogen mixed in proportions of twenty-one to seventy-nine make air. But air in experience is not a formula. Air is the elixir we breathe and live thereby. Air is the magician who takes the words that our lips frame and bears them from friend to friend in daily converse. Air is the messenger who carries music to our ears and fragrance to our nostrils; it is the whisperer among the trees in June, and in March the wild dancer who shakes the bare branches for his castanets. Air is the giant who piles the surf against the rocky shore, and the nurse who fans the faces of the sick. One cannot put that into a formula. No more can God be put into a theology, however true. Those who define Him best may understand Him least. God is the Unseen Friend, the Spiritual Presence, who calls us in ideals, warns us in remorse, renews us with His pardon, and comforts us with power. God is the Spirit of Righteousness in human life, whose victories we see in every moral gain, and allied with whom we have solid hopes of moral victory. God is the One who holds indeed the far stars in His hand, and yet in fellowship with whom each humblest child of God may find strength to do and to endure with constancy and fortitude and deathless hope. And when one lives close to Him, so that the inner doors swing easily on quiet hinges to let Him in, He is the One who illumines life with a radiance that human wills alone cannot attain. That is God — "Oh, taste and see that the Lord is good; blessed is the man who trusts in Him!" (Psalm 34:8 NKJV).