Chapter VIII — Faith and Moods

Daily Readings

The relationship of faith to feeling, rather than faith's relationship to mind, is with many people the more vital interest. The emotional results of faith are rightfully of intense concern to everyone, for our feelings put the sense of value into life. To see a sunset without being stirred by its beauty is to miss seeing the sunset; to have friends without feeling love for them is not to have friends; and to possess life without feeling it to be gloriously worth while is to miss living. Now, in this regard, the attitude of faith stands sharply opposed to its direct contrary — the attitude of fear. Faith and fear are the two emotional climates, in one or the other of which everyone tends habitually to live. To the comparison of these we set ourselves in the daily readings.

Eighth Week, First Day

Give ear to my prayer, O God, and do not hide Yourself from my supplication. Attend to me, and hear me; I am restless in my complaint, and moan noisily, because of the voice of the enemy, because of the oppression of the wicked; for they bring down trouble upon me, and in wrath they hate me. My heart is severely pained within me, and the terrors of death have fallen upon me. Fearfulness and trembling have come upon me, and horror has overwhelmed me. So I said, "Oh, that I had wings like a dove! I would fly away and be at rest. Indeed, I would wander far off, and remain in the wilderness." —Psalm 55:1–7 (NKJV)

How many people are slaves to the mood from which this psalmist suffered! "Fearfulness and trembling" are their habitual attitude toward life. They fear to die and just as much they fear to live; before every vexatious problem, before every opposing obstacle, even before the common tasks and responsibilities of daily living, they stand in dread; and every piece of work is done by them at least three times — in previous worry, in anxious performance, and in regretful retrospect. Such fear imprisons the soul. No two people really live in the same world; for while the outward geography may be identical, the real environment of each soul is created by our moods, tempers, and habits of thought. Fear builds a prison about a person, and bars them in with dreads, anxieties, and timid doubts. And they will live forever in that prison unless faith sets them free. Faith is the great liberator. The psalmist who found himself a prisoner of "fearfulness and trembling" obtained his liberty and became a "soul in peace" (v. 18); and the secret of his freedom he revealed in the closing words of his psalm — "But I will trust in You." Faith of some sort is the only power that ever sets people free from the bondage of their timidities and dreads. If we are slaves of fearfulness, there is no substance in our claim to be people of faith; those who have vital faith are not habitually fearful. And as Emerson said, "He has not learned the lesson of life who does not every day surmount a fear."

O God, we remember with sadness our want of faith in You. What might have been a garden we have turned into a desert by our sin and willfulness. This beautiful life which You have given us we have wasted in futile worries and vain regrets and empty fears. Instead of opening our eyes to the joy of life, the joy that shines in the leaf, the flower, the face of an innocent child, and rejoicing in it as in a sacrament, we have sunk back into the complainings of our narrow and blinded souls. O deliver us from the bondage of unchastened desires and unwholesome thoughts. Help us to conquer hopeless brooding and faithless reflection, and the impatience of irritable weakness. To this end, increase our faith, O Lord. Fill us with a more complete trust in You, and the desire for a more whole-hearted surrender to Your will. Then every sorrow will become a joy. Then shall we say to the mountains that lie heavy on our souls, "Remove and be cast hence" and they shall remove, and nothing shall be impossible to us. Then shall we renew our strength, and mount up with wings as eagles; we shall run and not be weary; we shall walk and not faint. We offer this prayer in the name of Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. —Samuel McComb.

Eighth Week, Second Day

Not only is it true that fear imprisons while faith liberates; fear paralyzes and faith empowers. The only attitude in which we have command of our faculties and are at our best, is the attitude of faith; while fear bewilders the mind and paralyzes the will. The physical effects of fear are deadly; it positively inhibits any useful thinking; and in the spiritual life its results are utterly demoralizing. Fear is the panic of a soul. Consider such an estate as the author of Deuteronomy presents:

"And among those nations you shall find no rest, nor shall the sole of your foot have a resting place; but there the Lord will give you a trembling heart, failing eyes, and anguish of soul. Your life shall hang in doubt before you; you shall fear day and night, and have no assurance of life. In the morning you shall say, 'Oh, that it were evening!' And at evening you shall say, 'Oh, that it were morning!' because of the fear which terrifies your heart, and because of the sight which your eyes see." —Deuteronomy 28:65–67 (NKJV)

Such a situation oppresses every vital power, and the conquest of such a situation must always be inward before it can be outward; the person must pass from fear to faith. Let even a little faith arise, and power begins to return. We fear that we cannot overcome evil habits, that we cannot successfully meet difficult situations, that we cannot hold out in the Christian life, and that great causes cannot be fought through to victory — and the weakness which appalls us is the creation of our own misgiving.

But faith is tonic; the results which follow a change of heart from fear to faith are miraculous; spiritual dwarfs grow to giants and achieve successes that before would have been unbelievable. No verse in Scripture has behind it a greater mass of verifiable experience than: "This is the victory that has overcome the world — our faith" (1 John 5:4 NKJV).

Gracious Father, You have invited us, unworthy as we are, to pray for all sorts and conditions of people.... We pray for all who are in bondage to fear, unable to face the tasks of life or bear the thought of death with peace and dignity. Free them from the tyranny of these dark dreads. Let the inspiration of a great faith or hope seize their souls, and lift them above their fruitless worry and idle torments, into a region of joy and peace and blessedness. We pray for the victims of evil habits, the slaves of alcohol or morphine, or any other pretended redeemer of the soul from weariness and pain. Great is the power of these degrading temptations; but greater still is the saving energy of Your Spirit. So let Your Spirit enter the hearts of these unhappy children of Yours, that their will may be made strong to resist, and that the burning heat of high thoughts may consume the grosser desires of the flesh. We pray for souls bound beneath self-imposed burdens, vexed by miseries of their own making; for the children of melancholy, who have lost their way and grope without a light; for those who do their work with no enthusiasm, and, when night falls, can find no sleep though they search for it as for hidden treasure. Let Your light pierce through their gloom and shine upon their path....

Unite us to Jesus Christ, Your perfect Son, in the bonds of a living trust, so that sustained by His example, and sanctified by His Spirit, we may grow more and more into the image of His likeness. These, and all other blessings, we ask in His name and for His sake. Amen. —Samuel McComb.

Eighth Week, Third Day

There are many situations in life which naturally throw the pall of dread over the soul. Life is seldom easy, it is often overwhelmingly difficult, and if a person has worry in their temperament, circumstances supply plenty of occasions on which to exercise it. The difference between people lies here: those in whom the fear-attitude is master hold the oppressive trouble so close to the eye that it hides everything else; those whom the faith-attitude dominates hold trouble off and see it in wide perspectives. A copper cent can hide the sun if we hold it close enough to the eye, and a transient difficulty can shut out from a fearful soul all life's large blessings and all the horizons of divine good will. Fear disheartens by concentrating attention on the unhappy aspects of life; but faith is the great encourager. Whittier lived in a generation full of turmoil and trouble, and his own life is a story of prolonged struggle against illness, disappointments, and poverty. But, listen:

That is the attitude of faith; it does not deny the evil, but it sees around it, refuses to be obsessed or scared by it, and takes heart from a large view when a small view would be appalling. And history always confirms the large view. Fear may be right for the moment, but in the long run it is a liar; only faith tells the truth.

Be merciful to me, O God, for man would swallow me up; fighting all day he oppresses me. My enemies would hound me all day, for there are many who fight against me, O Most High. Whenever I am afraid, I will trust in You. —Psalm 56:1–3 (NKJV)

Almighty and ever-living God, we draw near to You, believing that You are, and that You will reward all those who diligently seek You. We are weak, mortal people, immersed in this world's affairs, buffeted by its sorrows, flung to and fro by its conflicts of right and wrong. We cry for some abiding stay, for some sure and steadfast anchorage. Reveal Yourself to us as the eternal God, as the unfathomable Love that encompasses every spirit You have made, and bears it on, through the light and the darkness alike, to the goal of Your own perfection. And yet, when You speak to us, we are covered with confusion, for now we remember all the sadness and evil disorder of our lives. You have visited our hearts with ideals fair and beautiful, but alas! we have grown weary in aspiration, and have declined into the sordid aims of our baser selves. You have given us the love of parent and of friend, that we might thereby learn something of Your own love; yet too often have we despised Your gift and shut our hearts to all the wonder and the glory. We make confession before You of our sin and folly and ignorance. Again and again we have vowed ourselves to Your service; again and again our languid wills have failed to do Your Will. We have been seduced by the sweet poison of sin, and even against light and knowledge we have done that which You abhor, and which in our secret hearts we loathe. And now we almost fear to repent, lest You should call us into judgment for a repentance that must needs be repented of. O mighty Savior! Be patient with us a little longer. Take us back to Yourself. Without You, we are undone; with You, we will take fresh heart of hope, and bind ourselves with a more effectual vow, and laying aside every weight and the sin which so easily ensnares us, we will follow You wherever You lead. Amen. —Samuel McComb.

Eighth Week, Fourth Day

Fear depresses vitality and is a fruitful cause of nervous disorders, with all their disastrous reactions on our health. Modern investigation has shown beyond any reasonable doubt that while illness comes often by way of the body, it comes also by way of the mind; our moods and tempers have a physical echo, and of all fatal mental states none is so ruinous as fear. It is not strange, therefore, that some people never are well. As Dr. McComb puts it, "Many play at living — they do not really live. They fear the responsibilities, the struggles, the adventures, not without risk, which life offers them. They fear illness. They fear poverty. They fear unhappiness. They fear danger. They fear the passion of sacrifice. They fear even the exaltation of a pure and noble love, until the settlements in money and social prestige have been duly certified. They fear to take a plunge into life's depths. They fear this world, and they fear still more the world beyond the grave." In such a mood no one can possibly be well. Faith, therefore, which drives out fear, has always been a minister of health. The Master's healings, which to the rationalism of a previous generation seemed incredible, in the light of the present knowledge seem inevitable. He had faith and He demanded faith, and wherever the faith-attitude can be set in motion against the fear-attitude and all its morbid brood, the consequences will be physical as well as moral. An outgrown custom of the early Church does not now seem so strange as it did a generation ago:

Is anyone among you suffering? Let him pray. Is anyone cheerful? Let him sing psalms. Is anyone among you sick? Let him call for the elders of the church, and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord. And the prayer of faith will save the sick, and the Lord will raise him up. And if he has committed sins, he will be forgiven. Confess your trespasses to one another, and pray for one another, that you may be healed. The effective, fervent prayer of a righteous man avails much. —James 5:13–16 (NKJV)

Eternal God, who are above all change and darkness, whose will begat us, and whose all present love enfolds and continually redeems us, Holy Guest who indwells, and comforts us; we have gathered to worship You, and in communion with You to find ourselves raised to the light of our life, and the Heaven of our desires.

Pour upon our consciousness the sense of Your wonderful nearness to us. Reveal to our weakness and distress the power and the grace that are more than sufficient for us. May we see what we are, Your Spirit-born children linked by nature, love, and choice to Your mighty being; and may the vision make all fears to fade, and a Divine strength to pulse within.

Enable us to carry out from this place the peace and strength that here we gain, to take into our homes a kinder spirit, a new thoughtfulness; that we may brighten sadness, heal the sick, and make happiness to abound. May we take into our daily tasks and life of labor, a sense of righteousness that shall be as salt to every evil and corrupting influence.

Because we have walked here awhile with You, may we be able to walk more patiently with others. Send us forth with love to the fallen, hope for the despairing, strength to impart to the weak and wayward; and carry on through us the work You commenced in Your Son our Brother and Savior God. Amen. —W. E. Orchard.

Eighth Week, Fifth Day

Fear makes impossible any satisfying joy in life. A person of faith may be deeply joyful even in disastrous circumstances, but a person of fear would be unhappy in heaven. Stevenson sings in "the saddest and the bravest song he ever wrote":

Sad this song may be, but at the heart of it is yet a fierce joy because faith is there. But put a person of fear in luxury and remove from them every visible cause of disquiet and they will still be miserable. The more one considers these two determinant moods in life, the more one sees that somehow the faith-attitude must be ours, if life is to be worth living. Without it life dries up into a Sahara; with it, we come into a company of the world's glad spirits, who one way or another have felt what the Psalmist sings:

The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? The Lord is the strength of my life; of whom shall I be afraid? When the wicked came against me to eat up my flesh, my enemies and foes, they stumbled and fell. Though an army may encamp against me, my heart shall not fear; though war may rise against me, in this I will be confident. One thing I have desired of the Lord, that will I seek: that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to behold the beauty of the Lord, and to inquire in His temple. For in the time of trouble He shall hide me in His pavilion; in the secret place of His tabernacle He shall hide me; He shall set me high upon a rock. And now my head shall be lifted up above my enemies all around me; therefore I will offer sacrifices of joy in His tabernacle; I will sing, yes, I will sing praises to the Lord. —Psalm 27:1–6 (NKJV)

Gracious Father! We confess the painful riddle of our being, that, while claiming kinship with You, we feel far from You. O, what means this strange bewilderment, this never-ending war between our worse and better thoughts? We are Yours by right, yet we have not given ourselves wholly to Your care. Our hearts know no rest, save in You, yet they have sought it in this world's vainglory, which passes away. We seek to quench our thirst at the cisterns of this earth, but they are broken cisterns, that can hold no water. Lead us to Your well of life that springs up eternally. Give us to drink of that spiritual water, of which, if anyone drinks, they shall never thirst again. We lament our want and poverty before You. Open our eyes to behold the unsearchable riches of Your grace, and increase our faith that we may make them ours. Unite us to You in the bonds of will and love and purpose. Out of Your fullness, which is in Christ, give to each one of us according to our need. Make us wise with His Wisdom; pure with His purity; strong with His strength; that we may rise into the power and glory of the life that is life indeed. Hear our hearts' weak and wandering cries, and when You hear, forgive and bless, for His sake. Amen. —Samuel McComb.

Eighth Week, Sixth Day

"No one can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or else he will be loyal to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon. Therefore I say to you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink; nor about your body, what you will put on. Is not life more than food and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air, for they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? Which of you by worrying can add one cubit to his stature? So why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin; and yet I say to you that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. Now if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today is, and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will He not much more clothe you, O you of little faith? Therefore do not worry, saying, 'What shall we eat?' or 'What shall we drink?' or 'What shall we wear?' For after all these things the Gentiles seek. For your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. But seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added to you." —Matthew 6:24–33 (NKJV)

The meaning of this passage hinges on the first "therefore." You cannot serve God and selfish gain at the same time, says Jesus; you should choose decisively to serve God; and therefore you must not be anxious about yourself. For anxious fear so concentrates our thought on ourselves that we can serve no one else. That this is the meaning of this familiar passage is clear also from its conclusion. The real reason for conquering anxious fear is that we may give ourselves wholeheartedly to the service of the Kingdom. That fear does spoil usefulness is obvious; we cannot be fearful for ourselves and considerate of our fellows. As Stevenson puts it in "Aes Triplex," "The man who has least fear for his own carcass has most time to consider others. That eminent chemist who took his walks abroad in tin shoes and subsisted wholly upon tepid milk had all his work cut out for him in considerate dealings with his own digestion. So soon as prudence has begun to grow up in the brain, like a dismal fungus, it finds its first expression in a paralysis of generous acts." The shame of our fearful living is that it circles about self, is narrowed down to mean solicitudes about our own comfort, and is utterly incapable of serving God or seeking first His Kingdom. Only faith puts folk at leisure from their small anxieties so that they can be servants of a worthy cause. Jesus, therefore, in this passage is not giving us the impossible injunction not to think about tomorrow; He is stating a truth of experience, that anxious fear for oneself which so draws in the thought that God's great causes are forgotten is a deadly peril in our life. By faith thrust out the mean and timid solicitudes, is His injunction, that life may be free to put first things first.

We come to You, our Father, that we may more deeply enter into Your joy. You turn darkness into day, and mourning into praise. You are our Fortress in temptation, our Shield in remorse, our Shelter in calamity, our Star of Hope in every sorrow. O Lord, we would know Your peace, deep, abiding, inexhaustible. When we seek Your peace, our weariness is gone, the sense of our imperfection ceases to discourage us, and our tired souls forget their pain. When, strengthened and refreshed by Your goodness, we return to the task of life, send us forth as servants of Jesus Christ in the service and redemption of the world. Send us to the hearts without love, to men and women burdened with heavy cares, to the miserable, the sad, the broken-hearted. Send us to the children whose heritage has been a curse, to the poor who doubt Your Providence, to the sick who crave for healing and cannot find it, to the fallen for whom no one cares. May we be ministers of Your mercy, messengers of Your helpful pity, to all who need You. By our sympathy, our prayers, our kindness, our gifts, may we make a way for the inflow of Your love into needy and loveless lives. And so may we have that love which alone is the fulfilling of Your law. Hasten the time when all shall love You and one another in You, when all the barriers that divide us shall be broken down, and every heart shall be filled with joy and every tongue with melody. These gracious gifts we ask, in Jesus' name. Amen. —Samuel McComb.

Eighth Week, Seventh Day

Fear does not reveal its disastrous consequences to the full until it colors one's thoughts about the source and destiny of life. Folk work joyfully at a picture-puzzle so long as they believe that the puzzle can be put together, that it was meant, completed, to compose a picture, and that their labor is an effort made in reasonable hope. But if they begin to fear that they are being fooled, that the puzzle is a hoax and never can be pieced together anywhere by anyone, how swiftly that suspicion will benumb their work! So joyful living depends on our conviction that this life is not a hapless accident, that a good purpose binds it all together, and that our labor for righteousness is not expended on a futile task without a worthy outcome. But fear blights all such hope; it whispers what one pessimist said aloud: "Life is not a tragedy but a farcical melodrama, which is the worst kind of play." That fear benumbs worthy living, kills hope, makes cynical disgust with life a reasonable attitude, and with its frost withers all our finest aspirations. Only faith in God can save us from such fear. Fear or faith — there is no dilemma so full of consequence. Fear imprisons, faith liberates; fear paralyzes, faith empowers; fear disheartens, faith encourages; fear sickens, faith heals; fear makes useless, faith makes serviceable — and, most of all, fear puts hopelessness at the heart of life, while faith rejoices in its God.

Oh, give thanks to the Lord, for He is good! For His mercy endures forever. Let Israel now say, "His mercy endures forever." Let the house of Aaron now say, "His mercy endures forever." Let those who fear the Lord now say, "His mercy endures forever." I called on the Lord in distress; the Lord answered me and set me in a broad place. The Lord is on my side; I will not fear. What can man do to me? —Psalm 118:1–6 (NKJV)

O God, we invoke Your blessing upon all who need You, and who are groping after You, if perhaps they may find You. Be gracious to those who bear the sins of others, who are vexed by the wrongdoing and selfishness of those near and dear to them, and reveal to them the glory of their fellowship with the sufferings of Christ. Brood in tenderness over the hearts of the anxious, the miserable, the victims of irrational fear and morbid imaginings. Redeem from slavery the men and women who have yielded to degrading habits. Put Your Spirit within them, that they may rise up in shame and sorrow and make confession to You, "So foolish was I, and ignorant; I was like a beast before You." And then let them have the glad assurance that You are with them, the secret of all good, the promise and potency of better things. Console with Your large consolation those who mourn for their loved dead, who count the empty places and long for the sound of a voice that is still. Inspire them with the firm conviction that the dead are safe in Your keeping, nay, that they are not dead, but live unto You. Give to all sorrowing ones a garland for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, and the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness. Remember for good all who are perplexed with the mysteries of existence, and who grieve because the world is so sad and unintelligible. Teach them that Your hand is on the helm of affairs, that You guide Your own world, and can change every dark cloud into bright sunshine. In this faith let them rest, and by this faith let them live. These blessings we ask in the name of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen. —Samuel McComb.

Comment for the Week

I

Many people do not find their most perplexing difficulty either in the realm of trust or of belief, but in a problem which includes both. They are confused because neither their experience of God nor their intellectual conviction of the reasonableness of faith is dependable and steady. Faith comes and goes in them with fluctuating moods that bring an appalling sense of insecurity. Their religious life is not stable and consistent; it runs through variant degrees of confidence and doubt, and its whimsical ups and downs continually baffle them. To classify some folk as people of faith and some as people of doubt does not, in the light of this experience, quite tally with the facts. There are moods of faith and moods of doubt in all of us and rarely does either kind secure unanimous consent. Were we to decide for irreligion, a minority protest would be vigorously urged in the interests of faith, and when most assuredly we choose religion, the prayer, "Lord, I believe; help my unbelief!" (Mark 9:24 NKJV) is still appropriate. We often seem to be exchanging, as Browning's bishop says:

Some hope arises when we observe that this experience which so perplexes us is fully acknowledged in the Bible. The popular supposition is that when one opens the Scripture one finds a world of constant and triumphant faith. No low moods and doubts can here obscure the trust of men; here God is always real, saints sing in prison or dying see their Lord enthroned in heaven. When one, however, really knows the Bible, it obviously is no serene record of untroubled faith. It is turbulent with moods and doubt.

Here, to be sure, is the fifteenth chapter of First Corinthians, on Immortality, but here too is another cry, burdened with all the doubt anyone ever felt about eternal life, "For what happens to the sons of men also happens to animals; one thing befalls them: as one dies, so dies the other. Surely, they all have one breath; man has no advantage over animals" (Ecclesiastes 3:19 NKJV). The Scripture has many exultant passages on divine faithfulness, but Jeremiah's bitter prayer is not excluded: "Why is my pain perpetual, and my wound incurable, which refuses to be healed? Will You surely be to me like an unreliable stream, as waters that fail?" (Jeremiah 15:18 NKJV). The confident texts on prayer are often quoted, but there are cries of another sort: Job's complaint, "Look, I go forward, but He is not there, and backward, but I cannot perceive Him" (Job 23:8 NKJV); Habakkuk's bitterness, "O Lord, how long shall I cry, and You will not hear? Even cry out to You, 'Violence!' and You will not save" (Habakkuk 1:2 NKJV). The Bible is no book of tranquil faith. From the time when Gideon, in a mood like that of multitudes today, cried, "O my lord, if the Lord is with us, why then has all this happened to us?" (Judges 6:13 NKJV) to the complaint of the slain saints in the Apocalypse, "How long, O Lord, holy and true, until You judge and avenge our blood" (Revelation 6:10 NKJV), the Bible is acquainted with doubt. It knows the searching, perplexing, terrifying questions that in all ages vex our souls. If the Psalmist, in an exultant mood, sang, "The Lord is my shepherd," he also cried, "Lord, why do You cast off my soul? Why do You hide Your face from me?" (Psalm 88:14 NKJV).

No aspect of the Scripture could bring it more warmly into touch with our experience than this confession of fluctuating moods. At least in this the Bible is our book. Great heights are there, that we know something of. Psalmists sing in adoration, prophets are sure of God and of His coming victory; apostles pledge in sacrifice the certainty of their belief, and the Master on Transfiguration Mountain prays until His countenance is radiant. And depths are there, that modern people know well. Saints cry out against unanswered prayer and cannot understand how such an evil, wretched world is ruled by a good God; in their bitter griefs they complain that God has cast them off, and utterly forgotten and, dismayed, doubt even that a person's death differs from a dog's. This is our book. For the faith of many of us, however we insist that we are Christians, is not tranquil, steady, and serene. It is moody, occasional, spasmodic, with hours of great assurance, and other hours when confidence sags and trust is insecure.

II

Faith so generally is discussed as though it were a creed, accepted once for all and thereafter statically held, that the influence of our moods on faith is not often reckoned with. But the moods of faith are the very pith and marrow of our actual experience. When a Christian congregation recite together their creedal affirmation, "I believe in God," it sounds as though they all maintained a solid, constant faith. But when in imagination, one breaks up the congregation and interprets from knowledge of people's lives what the faith of the individuals actually means, it becomes clear that they believe in God not evenly and constantly, but more or less, sometimes very much, sometimes not confidently at all. Our faith in God is not a static matter such as the recitation of a creed suggests. Some things we do believe in steadily. That two plus two make four, that the summed angles of a triangle make two right angles — of such things we are unwaveringly sure. No moods can shake our confidence; no griefs confuse us, no moral failures quench our certainty. Though the heavens fall, two and two make four! But our faith in God belongs in another realm. It is a vital experience. It involves the whole person, with chameleon moods, glowing insights, exalted hours, and dejected days when life flows sluggishly and no great thing seems real.

This experience of variable moods in faith does not belong especially to feeble folk, whose ups and downs in their life with God would illustrate their whole irresolute and flimsy living. The great believers sometimes know best this tidal rise and fall of confidence. Elijah one day, with absolute belief in God, defied the hosts of Baal and the next, in desolate reaction, wanted to die. Luther put it with his rugged candor, "Sometimes I believe and sometimes I doubt." John Knox, at liberty to preach, "dings the pulpit into blads" in his confident utterance; but the same Knox recalled that, in the galleys, his soul knew "anger, wrath, and indignation which it conceived against God, calling all his promises in doubt." The Master Himself was not a stranger to this experience. He believed in God with unwavering assurance, as one believes in the shining of the sun. But the fact that the sun perpetually shines did not imply that every day was a sunshiny day for Him. The clouds came pouring up out of His dark horizons and hid the sun. "Now My soul is troubled, and what shall I say?" (John 12:27 NKJV). And once the fog drove in, so dense and dark that one would think there never had been any sun at all. "My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?" (Matthew 27:46 NKJV).

This experience of fluctuating moods is too familiar to be denied, too influential to be neglected. There can be no use in hiding it from candid thought behind the recitation of a creedal formula. There may be great use in searching out its meaning. For there are ways in which this common experience, at first vexatious and disquieting, may supply solid ground for Christian confidence.

III

In dealing with these variant moods of faith we are not left without an instrument. We have the sense of value. We discern not only the existence of things, but their worth as well. When, therefore, we have recognized our moods as facts, we have not said all that we can say about them. Upon no objects of experience can the sense of value be used with so much certainty as upon our moods. We know our best hours when they come. The lapidary, with unerring skill, learns to distinguish a real diamond from a false, but that knowledge is external and contingent, compared with the inward and authoritative certainty with which we know our best hours from our worst. Our great moods carry with them the authentic marks of their superiority.

Experience readily confirms this truth. We all have, for example, cynical and sordid moods. At such times, only the appetites of physical life seem much to matter; only the things that minister to common comfort greatly count. When Sydney Smith, the English cleric, writes, "I feel an ungovernable interest in my horses, my pigs, and my plants. But I am forced and always was forced to task myself up to an interest in any higher objects," most of us can understand his mood. We grow obtuse at times to all that in our better moods had thrilled us most. Nature suffers in our eyes; great books seem dull; causes that once we served with zest lose interest, and personal relationships grow pale and tame. From such mere dullness we easily drift down to cynicism. Music once had stirred the depths, but now our spirits tally with the scoffer's jest, "What are you crying about with your Wagner and your Brahms? It is only horsehair scraping on catgut." Our most holy things may lose their grandeur and become a butt of ridicule. When the mood of Aristophanes is on, we too may hoist serious Socrates among the clouds, and set him talking moonshine while the cynical look on and laugh. The spirit that "sits in the seat of the scornful" is an ancient malady.

But everyone is thoroughly aware that these are not our best moods. From such depleted attitudes we come to worthier hours; real life arrives again. Nature and art become imperatively beautiful; moral causes seem worth sacrifice, and before our highest life, revealed in character, ideal, and faith, we stand in reverence. These are our great hours, when spiritual values take the throne, when all else dons livery to serve them, and we find it easy to believe in God.

Again, we have crushed and rebellious moods. We may have been Christians for many years; yet when disaster, long delayed, at last descends, and our dreams are wrecked, we do rebel. Complaint rises hot within us. Joseph Parker, preacher at the City Temple, London, at the age of sixty-eight could write that he had never had a doubt. Neither the goodness of God nor the divinity of Christ, nor anything essential to his Christian faith had he ever questioned. But within a year an experience had fallen of which he wrote: "In that dark hour I became almost an atheist. For God had set his foot upon my prayers and treated my petitions with contempt. If I had seen a dog in such agony as mine, I would have pitied and helped the dumb beast; yet God spat upon me and cast me out as an offense — out into the waste wilderness and the night black and starless." No new philosophy had so shaken the faith of this long unquestioning believer. But his wife had died and he was in a heartbroken mood that all his arguments, so often used on others, could not penetrate. He believed in God as one believes in the sun when one has lived six months in the polar night and has not seen it.

These heartbroken moods, however, are not our best. Out of rebellious grief we lift our eyes in time to see how others have borne their sorrows off and built them into character. We see great lives shine out from suffering, like Rembrandt's radiant faces from dark backgrounds. We see that all the virtues which we most admire — constancy, patience, fortitude — are impossible without stern settings, and that in time of trouble they find their aptest opportunity, their noblest chance. We rise into a new mood, grow resolute not to be crushed, but, as though there were moral purpose in our trials, to be hallowed, deepened, purified. The meaning of Samuel Rutherford's old saying dawns upon us, "When I am in the cellar of affliction, I reach out my hand for the king's wine." And folk, seeing us, it may be, take heart and are assured that God is real, since He can make a person bear off their trial like that and grow the finer for it. These are our great hours too, when the rains descend, and the winds blow, and the floods come, and beat upon our house, and it is founded on a rock!

Once more, we have hours of discouragement about the world. The more we have cared for moral causes and invested life in their advancement, the more we are desolate when they seem to fail. Some rising tide in which we trusted turns to ebb again, injustice wins its victories, the people listen to demagogues and not to statesmen, social causes essential to human welfare are balked, wars come and undo the hopes of centuries. Who does not sometimes fall into the Slough of Despond? Cavour, disheartened about Italy, went to his room to kill himself. John Knox, dismayed about Scotland, in a pathetic prayer entitled, "John Knox with deliberate mind to his God," wrote, "Now, Lord put an end to my misery." We generally think of Luther in that intrepid hour when he faced Charles V at Worms; but he had times as well when he was sick with disappointment. "Old, decrepit, lazy, worn out, cold, and now one-eyed," so runs a letter, "I write, my Jacob, I who hoped there might at length be granted to me, already dead, a well-earned rest." During the Great War, this mood of discouragement grew familiar. Many can understand what Robert Louis Stevenson meant when he wrote, of the Franco-Prussian war, "In that year, cannon were roaring for days together on French battlefields, and I would sit in my isle (I call it mine after the use of lovers) and think upon the war, and the pain of men's wounds, and the weariness of their marching.... It was something so distressing, so instant, that I lay in the heather on the top of the island, with my face hid, kicking my heels for agony."

But these dismayed hours are not our best. As Bunyan put it, even Giant Despair has fainting fits on sunshiny days. In moods of clearer insight we perceive out of how many Egypts, through how many round-about wilderness journeys, God has led His people to how many Promised Lands. The Exodus was not a failure, although the Hebrews, disheartened, thought it was and even Moses had his dubious hours; the mission of Israel did not come to an ignoble end in the Exile, although multitudes gave up their faith because of it and only prophets dared believe the hopeful truth. The crucifixion did not mean the Gospel's end, as the disciples thought, nor did Paul, imprisoned, lose his ministry. Nothing in history is more assured than this, that only people of faith have known the truth. And in hours of vision when this fact shines clear we rise to be our better selves again. What a clear ascent the race has made when wide horizons are taken into view! What endless possibilities must lie ahead! What ample reasons we possess to thrust despair aside, and to go out to play our part in the forward movement of the plan of God!

These are our better hours.

IV

Such sordid, cynical, crushed, rebellious, and discouraged moods we suffer, but we have hours of insight, too, when we are at our best. And as we face this ebb and flow of confidence, which at the first vexatiously perplexed our faith, an arresting truth is clear. The creed of irreligion, to which we are tempted to resign our minds, is simply the intellectual formulation of what is implied in our less noble hours. Take what our cynical, sordid, crushed, rebellious, and discouraged moods imply, and set it in a formal statement of life's meaning, and the result is the creed of irreligion. But take our best hours, when the highest seems the realest, when even sorrows cannot crush the soul, and when the world is still the battlefield of God for us, and formulate what these hours imply, and the result is the central affirmations of religious faith. Even Renan is sure that "man is most religious in his best moments." Of this high interpretation our variant moods are susceptible, that we know our best hours when they come, and the faith implied in them is essential Christianity. As Browning sings it:

This fact which we so have come upon is a powerful consideration in favor of religion's truth. Are we to trust for our guidance the testimony of our worse or better hours? We have low moods; so, too, we have cellars in our houses. But we do not live there; we live upstairs! It is not unnatural to have irreligious moods. There may be hours when the eternal Energy from which this universe has come seems to be playing solitaire for fun. It shuffles the stars and planets to see what may chance from their combinations, and careless of the consequence, from everlasting to everlasting it shuffles and plays, and shuffles and plays again. But these are not our best hours. We may have moods when the universe seems to us, as Carlyle's figure pictures it, "as if the heavens and the earth were but boundless jaws of a devouring monster, wherein, I, palpitating, lay waiting to be devoured," but we are inwardly ashamed of times like that. We come to this brutal universe of irreligion by way of our ignoble moods. When we lift up our soul in our great hours of love, of insight, and of devotion, life never looks to us as irreligion pictures it; it never has so looked and it never will!

In our best hours we always suspect that the Eternal must be akin to what is best in us, that our ideals are born from above, have there their source and destiny, that the Eternal Purpose reigns and yet shall justify the struggle of the ages, and that in anyone who is the best we know, we see most clearly what the Eternal is and means. That goodness is deeper than evil, that spirit is more than flesh, that life is lord of death, that love is the source of all — such convictions come naturally to us when we are at our best. When one examines such affirmations, one perceives that Christianity in its essential faiths is the expression of our finest hours. This is the source whence Christianity has come; it is our best become articulate. Some used to say that Christian faith had been foisted on humanity by priests. Christian faith has no more artificially been foisted upon human life than the full blown rose is foisted on the bud. Christianity springs up out of our best life; it is the utterance of our transcendent moods; it is humanity believing in the validity of its own noblest days.

Christianity, therefore, at its heart can never fail. Its theologies may come and go, its institutions rise and fall, its rituals have their dawn, their zenith, and their decline, but one persistent force goes on and will go on. The Gospel is saying to us what we at our best are saying to ourselves. Christ has a tremendous ally in human life — our noblest hours. They are all upon His side. What He says, they rise to cry "Amen" to. When we are most truly ourselves we are nearest to Him. Antagonistic philosophies, therefore, may spring up to assail the Gospel's influence, and seem to triumph, and fall at last and be forgotten. Still Christ will go on speaking. Nothing can tear Him from His spiritual influence over us. In every generation He has our noblest hours for His ally.

V

In the fact to which our study of our variant moods has brought us we have not only a confirming consideration in favor of religion's truth, but an explanation of some people's unbelief. They live habitually in their low moods; they inhabit spiritual cellars. We are accustomed to say that some friend would be saved from their ignoble attitudes by a vital religious faith; but it is also true that their persistent clinging to ignoble attitudes may be the factor that makes religious faith impossible. According to Dickens's "Tale of Two Cities" a prisoner in the Bastille, who had lived in a cell and cobbled shoes for many years, became so enamored of the narrow walls, the darkness, the task's monotony, that, when liberated, he built a cell at the center of his English home, and on days when the skies were clear and birds were singing, the tap of his cobbler's hammer in the dark could still be heard. So people, by a habitual residence in imprisoning moods, render themselves incapable of loving the wide horizons, the great faiths and hopes of religion. They do not merely make excursions of transient emotion into morose hours and, like travelers who find that the road is running into malarial swamps, turn swiftly to the hills. They dwell in their moroseness; they choose it, and often obstinately resist deliverance.

The common moods that thus incapacitate the soul for faith are easily seen in anyone's experience. There are sullen tempers when we are churlish and want so to be. There are stupid tempers, when our soul is too negligent to care, too dull to ask for what only aspiring minds can crave or find. There are bored moods when we feel about all life what Malachi's people felt about worship, "Oh, what a weariness!" (Malachi 1:13 NKJV); rebellious moods when, like Jonah, deprived of a comfort he desired, we cry, "It is right for me to be angry, even to death!" (Jonah 4:9 NKJV); suspicious moods, when we mistrust everyone, and even of some righteous Job hear Satan's insinuating sneer, "Does Job fear God for nothing?" (Job 1:9 NKJV). No one is altogether strange to frivolous hours, when those thoughts are lost which must be handled seriously if at all, and willful hours, when some private desire assumes the center of the stage and angrily resents another voice than its own. To say that one who habitually harbors such moods cannot know God is only a portion of the truth; such a person cannot know anything worth knowing. They can know neither fine friends nor great books; they cannot appreciate beautiful music or sublime scenery; they are lost to the deepest loves of family and to every noble enthusiasm for human help. Athwart the knowledge of these most gracious and necessary things stand our obtuse, ignoble moods. The sullen, stupid, bored, rebellious, suspicious, frivolous, or willful tempers, made into a spiritual residence, are the most deadly prison of the soul. Of course one who dwells there has no confidence in God. Lord Shaftesbury, the English philanthropist, made too sweeping a statement about this, but one can see the basis for his judgment: "Nothing beside ill-humor, either natural or forced, can bring a man to think seriously that the world is governed by any devilish or malicious power. I very much question whether anything beside ill-humor can be the cause of atheism." At least one may be sure that where ill-humor habitually reigns, vital faith in God is made impossible.

After full acknowledgment, therefore, of the momentous intellectual problems of belief, we must add that there is a moral qualification for faith in God. So great a matter is not achieved by any sort of person, with any kind of habitual moods and tempers. There are views which cellar windows do not afford; one must have balconies to see them. When Jesus said that the pure in heart are blessed because they see God, He was not thinking merely, perhaps not chiefly, of sexual impurity as hindering vision. He was pleading for a heart cleansed of all such perverse, morose, and wayward moods as shut the blinds on the soul's windows. He knew that people could not easily escape the sense of God's reality if they kept their vision clear. On elevated days we naturally think of Spirit as real, and see ourselves as expressions of spiritual purpose, our lives as servants of a spiritual cause. When one habitually dwells in these finer moods, one cannot tolerate a world where one's Best is a transient accident. We must have God, for faith in God is the supreme assertion of the reality and eternity of our Best. Anyone who habitually lives in their finest moods will not easily escape the penetrating sense of God's reality.

VI

The certainty with which we tend to be most deeply religious in our best hours is clear when we consider that we do practically believe in the things which we count of highest worth. Lotze, the philosopher, even says that "Faith is the feeling that is appreciative of value." It is conceivable that one might be so constituted that without any sense of value one could study facts, as a deaf person might observe a symphony. The sound-waves such a person could mechanically measure; they could analyze the motions of the players and note the reactions of the crowd, but they would hear no music. They would not suffuse the whole performance with their musical appreciations; they would neither like it nor condemn. We might be so constituted as to face facts without feeling, but we are not. Facts never stand in our experience thus barren and unappreciated — mere neutral things that mean nothing and have no value. The botanist in us may analyze the flowers, but the poet in us estimates them. The penologist in us may take the Bertillon measurements of a young offender, but the parent in us best can tell how much, in spite of all their sin, that person is worth. This power to estimate life's values is the fountain from which spring our music, painting, and literature, our ideals and loves and purposes, our morals and religion. Without it no one can live in the real world at all.

If we would know, therefore, in what, at our highest altitudes, we tend to believe, we should ask what it is that we value most, when we rise toward our best. In our lowest hours what sordid, mercenary, beastly things we may prize each heart knows well. But ever as we approach our best the things that are worth most to us become elevated and refined. Our better moods open our eyes to a world where character is of more worth than all the rest beside, and through which moral purpose runs, to be served with sacrifice. We become aware of spiritual values in behalf of which at need physical existence must be willingly laid down; and words like honor, love, fidelity, and service in our hours of insight have halos over them that poorer moods cannot discern. At our best, that is to say, we believe in an invisible world of spiritual values, and we furnish the final proof of our faith's reality by sacrificing to it all lesser things. The good, the true, the beautiful command us in our finer hours, and at their beck and call we lay down wealth and ease and earthly hopes to be their servant. We really do believe in the things for which we sacrifice and die.

In no more searching way can a person's faith be described than in terms of the objects which they value most. Wherever people find some consuming aim that is for them so supreme in worth that they sacrifice all else to win it, we speak of their attitude as a religion. The "religion of science" describes the absolute devotion of investigators to scientific research as the highest good; the "religion of art" describes the consuming passion with which some value beauty. When we say of one that "money is his God" we mean that they estimate it as life's highest treasure, and when with Paul we speak of others, "whose god is their belly" (Philippians 3:19 NKJV), we mean people whose sensual life is to them the thing worth most. What we believe in, therefore, is most deeply seen not by any opinions which we profess, but by the things we prize. Faith, as Ruskin said, is "that by which men act while they live; not that which they talk of when they die." Many a person uses pious affirmations of Christian faith, but it is easy to observe from their life that what they really believe in is money. Where our treasure is, as Jesus said, our heart is, and there our faith is, too.

Is there any doubt, then, what we most believe in when we are at our best? While in our lower altitudes it may be easy to believe that the physical is the ultimately real, in our upper altitudes we so value the spiritual world, that we tend with undeniable conviction to feel sure that it must be causal and eternal. Materialism is our "night-view" of life; but the "day-view" is religion. Tyndall the scientist was regarded by the Christians of his generation as the enemy of almost everything that they held dear. Let him, then, be witness for the truth which we have stated. "I have noticed," he said, speaking of materialism, "during years of self-observation, that it is not in hours of clearness and vigor that this doctrine commends itself to my mind."

The challenge, therefore, presented to every one of us by Christian faith is ultimately this: Shall I believe the testimony of my better hours or of my worse? Many who deny the central affirmations of the Gospel put the object of their denial far away from them as though it were an external thing; they say that they deny the creed or the Bible or the doctrine about God. Such a description of a person's rejection of religious faith is utterly inadequate — the real object of their denial is inward. One may, indeed, discredit forms of doctrine and either be unsure about or altogether disbelieve many things that Christians hold, but when one makes a clean sweep of religion and banishes the central faiths of Christianity they are denying the testimony of their own finest days. From such rejection of faith one need not appeal to creed nor Bible, nor to anything that anybody ever said. Let the challenge strike inward to the person's own heart. From the denial of religious faith we may appeal to the hours that they have known and yet will know again, when the road rose under their feet and from a height they looked on wide horizons and knew that they were at their best. To those hours of clear insight, of keen thought, of love and great devotion, when they knew that the spiritual is the real and the eternal, we may appeal. They were their best. They know that they were their best. And as long as humanity lives upon the earth this conviction must underlie great living — that we will not deny the validity of our own best hours.