'Blessed are they who have not seen and yet have believed.' I need not
do more than just in a sentence remind you that we shall very poorly
understand either this saying or this Gospel or the greater part of the
New Testament, if we do not make it very clear to our minds that
'believing' is not credence only but trust. The object of the
Christian's faith is not a proposition; it is not a dogma nor a truth,
but a Person. And the act of faith is not an acceptance of a given
fact, a Resurrection or any other, as true, but it is a reaching out of
the whole nature to Him and a resting upon Him. I have said that Thomas
had no right to bring his will to bear on the act of belief, considered
as the intellectual act of accepting a thing as true. But Christian
faith, being more than intellectual belief, does involve the activity
of the will. Credence is the starting-point, but it is no more. There
may be belief in the truth of the gospel and not a spark of faith in
the Christ revealed by the gospel.
Even in regard to that lower kind of belief, the assent which does not
rest on sense has its own blessing. We sometimes are ready to think
that it would have been easier to believe if 'we had seen with our
eyes, and our hands had handled the (incarnate) Word of Life' but that
is a mistake.
This generation, and all generations that have not seen Him, are not in
a less advantageous position in regard either to credence or to trust,
than were those that companied with Him on earth, and the blessing
Which He breathed out in that upper room comes floating down the ages
like a perfume diffused through the atmosphere, and is with us fragrant
as it was in the 'days of His flesh.' There is nothing in the world's
history comparable to the warmth and closeness of conscious contact
with that Christ, dead for nearly nineteen centuries now, which is the
experience today of thousands of Christian men and women. All other
names pass, and as they recede through the ages, thickening veils of
oblivion, mists of forgetfulness, gather round them. They melt away
into the fog and are forgotten. Why is it that one Person, and one
Person only, triumphs even in this respect over space and time, and is
the same close Friend with whom millions of hearts are in loving touch,
as He was to those that gathered around Him upon earth?
What is the blessing of this faith that does not rest on sense, and
only in a small measure on testimony or credence? Part of its blessing
is that it delivers us from the tyranny of sense, sets us free from the
crowding oppression of 'things seen and temporal'; draws back the veil
and lets us behold 'the things that are unseen and eternal.' Faith is
sight, the sight of the inward eye. It is the direct perception of the
unseen. It sees Him who is invisible. The vision which is given to the
eye of faith is more real in the true sense of that word, more
substantial in the true sense of that word, more reliable and more near
than that sight by which the bodily eye beholds external things. We
see, when we trust, greater things than when we look. The blessing of
blessings is that the faith which triumphs over the things seen and
temporal, brings into every life the presence of the unseen Lord.
Brethren! do not confound credence with trust. Remember that trust does
involve an element of will. Ask yourselves if the things seen and
temporal are great enough, lasting enough, real enough to satisfy you,
and then remember whose lips said, 'Become not faithless but
believing,' and breathed His last Beatitude upon those 'who have not
seen and yet have believed.' We may all have that blessing lying like
dew upon us, amidst the dust and scorching heat of the things seen and
temporal. We shall have it, if our heart's trust is set on Him, whom
one of the listeners on that Sunday spoke of long after, in words which
seem to echo that promise, as 'Jesus in whom though now ye see Him not,
yet believing ye rejoice with joy unspeakable and full of glory,
receiving the end of your faith, even the salvation of your souls.'