"No one asked Jesus, How can faith be obtained? because Jesus did not regard faith as an arbitrary gift of the Almighty, or an occasional visitant to favored persons, but as one of the senses of the soul. Jesus did not divide men into those who had faith and those who had not; but into those who used the faculty, and those who refused to use it. He expected people to believe when He presented evidence, as you expect one to look, if you show him a picture."-Ian Maclaren. A Greylock Pulpit. WHAT IS FAITH ? Jesus answered and said unto them, This is the work of God, that ye believe on Him, whom He hath sent.-Jno. 6:29. The terms faith and belief have been the occasion of more misunderstanding than all other words put together. The seat of difficulty is not primarily poverty of speech, but tardiness of human progress. Yet how unfortunate it is that we have used a word, where lucidity is most demanded, which we associate with many different and conflicting ideas. If we speak of Christianity, as a philosophy, a history, and a life, combined, we call it "the Faith." Paul quotes the Jewish Christians as saying: He who persecuted us in times past, now preacheth the faith, which once he destroyed." The word faith is employed to express assent to a real or supposed fact. It is our faith, belief or conviction. We think we know the ground of a statement. We say, "We believe it." We think we identify a person. We believe that it is he. If evidence is sufficient to confirm, we are accurate, if insufficient, mistaken. Matthew reports an instance in point concerning our Lord's appearance subsequent to His resurrection. "And when they saw Him, they worshiped Him, but some doubted.” It has been customary to speak of those worshiping, as believers, and those doubting, as unbelievers. There is no reflection implied.. There may easily be imagined a great many reasons explaining this doubt. Different people, equally virtuous, require different amounts of evidence for the same assent. Some who doubted, may have had more commendable characters, than some who assented. The wish to be convinced may have been deeper in some who doubted, than in others who needed no further proof. In contrast, there is a use of the word which makes it substantially the same as repentance. One who has not been living up to his light, exercises what is called a "saving faith," when he repents. He has deliberately faced, and deliberately refused to take account of plain moral truth. He is under self-condemnation, not because he differs from others on matters of theory, but because he treats truth, already clear to his mind, as though it were untrue. If he repents, he decides to be true to all the truth he knows. Faith is thus voluntary, not dependent on what he knew yesterday or will know tomorrow, nor upon what he now knows, but on his voluntary attitude toward present knowledge. It deals not with what “people say” to be true, nor with a body of Divine truth, not necessarily with any formula by which men seek to condense truth, but with the truth which is now true to them. The faith which is subject to will, is more properly called faithfulness than faith. The use of it, as the soul's response to an intellectual proposition brought to it, is not supported by the New Testament. One can not be a responsible being without intellect, but he can have high moral attainments and not understand some fundamental matters of thought. Faithful to the inner sense of truth, as it is enlarged by varying education, a man can exercise faith as promptly as he can do anything calling for an act of will. This is a very dangerous, and to me, false use of the word faith, because it is so easy to confound the inner and outer truth; the explanation of facts, with the essential items of obligation. We are painfully lugging a word out of the realm of pure thought, where the will is secondary or silent, and applying it to an act, which makes action and purpose supreme. We are left to infer that if creeds and catechisms are brought to us, we are to take a "leap of faith" or a step, as the case may be, concluding the whole matter by thinking with our wills and dispensing with brains, yet naming the stultifying feat by a word making thought characteristic and primary. If however, we hold ourselves severely to the task of being loyal to the inner truth, we shall soon see that not only people in different ages, but people of the same age, county and village, have widely differing supplies of this sort of truth. The question is asked, "How little can a man believe and still be honest or genuine?" The answer is, he must believe in honesty, in genuineness. The practice of honesty, which is thoroughgoing, is not a treadmill experience, but necessitates progress. The heroes of the faith have varying riches of knowledge, according to the time in their lives, when appraised. The constant factor common to the earliest day and to the last, is faithfulness. The intellectual content varies, with widening opportunity, the intensity of life, and the fulness of years. More than this, the knowledge, that is worked out in one's own life, is of quite another sort than the so called knowledge which is thrown upon the soul from without. We learn, not so much by being told, as by hard knocks of experience. Theological seminaries must adopt the new canons of education. They must study the pupil. The deductive method is ultimately to be thrown out as dishonest. The inductive order of experiment is the Divine order of all education. Theological professors should not only say this is dangerous to deny, but this is more dangerous to accept. There is no knowledge in the moral realm that can be honestly acquired, save by a moral process. Knowledge is not ours till it is wrought out in our own experience. Teachers may sometimes indicate a negative, but pupils must know for themselves. Obedience is the only "organ" of "spiritual knowledge." "He that doeth the will of God, shall know of the doctrine." This spiritual knowledge is not antagonistic to material knowledge, yet supreme. The size and weight of a stone is material knowledge. It is information which belongs to another sphere than that of hope, courage and love. We gain knowledge in each sphere by single steps of discovery and test. The field of application is different, the process is similar but not the same. The fact that a stone has no feeling, neither confirms, or invalidates, the verified weight. The fact that love involves feeling, is no detraction. It is rather evidence of that living personal source, who is the organ of life, the supreme object of faith. The science which interests itself in our origin and destiny, must reckon with the facts which distinguish a man from a stone, and leave room for faith. Then comes that use of the word in the sense of confidence, where the soul animated by a feeling of filial trust rests in assurance. This is the faith differing in degree, which the people manifested toward Jesus Christ when in the flesh, and which they now manifest toward Him as the benefactor of mankind. This was the kind of faith, which the Lord used to accomplish works of beneficence and healing. As a rule, He required a state of soul suited to the desired result. Sometimes the recipient already had the faith desired, again Christ took steps to secure it. The woman, who touched the hem of His garment, brought her faith with her. The Syro-phoenician woman had her faith developed by an apparent rebuff. Those states of mind which are connected with strange healings and transformations, illustrations of which are not unusual, commonly belong to this type of faith. The power to rise above hindering physical influences, is a power well understood by Christ. He was acquainted with that range of prayer, and that kind of “fasting" or superiority to bodily conditions, which made Him equal to terrible_such states as met him after His descent from the mount of Transfiguration The author of the epistle to the Hebrews, gives us still another idea of faith. It is not a complete definition, but comes as near it as one can, who is finding the common ground between a true Israelite and a true Christian. "Faith," he declares, "is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." He follows this statement with a list of those who in the history of Israel, had distinuished themselves by moral sagacity and courage. He points to those who believed in God and in the ultimate triumph of righteousness. They were men of great moral sense. They penetrated the superficial occasions for fear, which paralyze ordinary men, and took the scoffs of their generation. “They wandered about in sheep-skins and goat-skins, destitute, afflicted, tormented." They were dreamers, idealists, heretics. They chose to move with the world-movement of God. They kept in the central current. They were with the cloud of witnesses, often few at a given time, but many in the aggregate, "of whom the world was not worthy." The prophet, according to the Scriptures, was a man whose natural gifts were such as to work out on moral lines in an exalted way. In one age we have Moses, in another Lincoln. In one age David, in another Whittier. In one age Gideon, in another Garfield and Gordon. The imagination has many worthy uses. One gives power to the artist, guiding his mind in the work of decoration and creation. It throws a |