FAITH may be defined as fidelity to our own being, so far as such being
is not and cannot become an object of the senses; and hence, by clear
inference or implication to being generally, as far as the same is not
the object of the senses; and again to whatever is affirmed or understood
as the condition, or concomitant, or consequence of the same. This will
be best explained by an instance or example. That I am conscious of
something within me peremptorily commanding me to do unto others as I
would they should do unto me; in other words a categorical (that is,
primary and unconditional) imperative; that the maxim (_regula maxima_,
or supreme rule) of my actions, both inward and outward, should be such
as I could, without any contradiction arising therefrom, will to be the
law of all moral and rational beings. This, I say, is a fact of which I
am no less conscious (though in a different way), nor less assured, than
I am of any appearance presented by my outward senses. Nor is this all;
but in the very act of being conscious of this in my own nature, I know
that it is a fact of which all men either are or ought to be conscious; a
fact, the ignorance of which constitutes either the non-personality of
the ignorant, or the guilt; in which latter case the ignorance is
equivalent to knowledge wilfully darkened. I know that I possess this
knowledge as a man, and not as Samuel Taylor Coleridge; hence, knowing
that consciousness of this fact is the root of all other consciousness,
and the only practical contradistinction of man from the brutes, we name
it the conscience, by the natural absence or presumed presence of which
the law, both Divine and human, determines whether X Y Z be a thing or a
person; the conscience being that which never to have had places the
objects in the same order of things as the brutes, for example, idiots,
and to have lost which implies either insanity or apostasy. Well, this
we have affirmed is a fact of which every honest man is as fully assured
as of his seeing, hearing, or smelling. But though the former assurance
does not differ from the latter in the degree, it is altogether diverse
in the kind; the senses being morally passive, while the conscience is
essentially connected with the will, though not always, nor indeed in any
case, except after frequent attempts and aversions of will dependent on
the choice. Thence we call the presentations of the senses impressions,
those of the conscience commands or dictates. In the senses we find our
receptivity, and as far as our personal being is concerned, we are
passive, but in the fact of the conscience we are not only agents, but it
is by this alone that we know ourselves to be such—nay, that our very
passiveness in this latter is an act of passiveness, and that we are
patient (_patientes_), not, as in the other case, _simply_ passive.
The result is the consciousness of responsibility, and the proof is
afforded by the inward experience of the diversity between regret and
remorse.
If I have sound ears, and my companion speaks to me with a due proportion
of voice, I may persuade him that I did not hear, but cannot deceive
myself. But when my conscience speaks to me, I can by repeated efforts
render myself finally insensible; to which add this other difference,
namely, that to make myself deaf is one and the same thing with making my
conscience dumb, till at length I became unconscious of my conscience.
Frequent are the instances in which it is suspended, and, as it were,
drowned in the inundation of the appetites, passions, and imaginations to
which I have resigned myself, making use of my will in order to abandon
my free-will; and there are not, I fear, examples wanting of the
conscience being utterly destroyed, or of the passage of wickedness into
madness; that species of madness, namely, in which the reason is lost.
For so long as the reason continues, so long must the conscience exist,
either as a good conscience or as a bad conscience.
It appears, then, that even the very first step—that the initiation of
the process, the becoming conscious of a conscience—partakes of the
nature of an act. It is an act in and by which we take upon ourselves an
allegiance, and consequently the obligation of fealty; and this fealty or
fidelity implying the power of being unfaithful, it is the first and
fundamental sense of faith. It is likewise the commencement of
experience, and the result of all other experience. In other words,
conscience in this its simplest form, must be supposed in order to
consciousness, that is, to human consciousness. Brutes may be and are
scions, but those beings only who have an I, _scire possunt hoc vel illud
una cum seipsis_; that is, _conscire vel scire aliquid mecum_, or to know
a thing in relation to myself, and in the act of knowing myself as acted
upon by that something.
Now the third person could never have been distinguished from the first
but by means of the second. There can be no He without a previous Thou.
Much less could an I exist for us except as it exists during the
suspension of the will, as in dreams; and the nature of brutes may be
best understood by considering them as somnambulists. This is a deep
meditation, though the position is capable of the strictest proof,
namely, that there can be no I without a Thou, and that a Thou is only
possible by an equation in which I is taken as equal to Thou, and yet not
the same. And this, again, is only possible by putting them in
opposition as correspondent opposites, or correlatives. In order to
this, a something must be affirmed in the one which is rejected in the
other, and this something is the will. I do not will to consider myself
as equal to myself, for in the very act of constructing myself _I_, I
take it as the same, and therefore as incapable of comparison, that is,
of any application of the will. If, then, I _minus_ the will be the
_thesis_, Thou, _plus_ will, must be the _antithesis_, but the equation
of Thou with I, by means of a free act, negativing the sameness in order
to establish the equality, is the true definition of conscience. But as
without a Thou there can be no You, so without a You no They, These, or
Those; and as all these conjointly form the materials and subjects of
consciousness and the conditions of experience, it is evident that
conscience is the root of all consciousness—_à fortiori_, the
precondition of all experience—and that the conscience cannot have been
in its first revelation deduced from experience.
Soon, however, experience comes into play. We learn that there are other
impulses beside the dictates of conscience, that there are powers within
us and without us ready to usurp the throne of conscience, and busy in
tempting us to transfer our allegiance. We learn that there are many
things contrary to conscience, and therefore to be rejected and utterly
excluded, and many that can coexist with its supremacy only by being
subjugated as beasts of burthen; and others again, as for instance the
social tendernesses and affections, and the faculties and excitations of
the intellect, which must be at least subordinated. The preservation of
our loyalty and fealty under these trials, and against these rivals,
constitutes the second sense of faith; and we shall need but one more
point of view to complete its full import. This is the consideration of
what is presupposed in the human conscience. The answer is ready. As in
the equation of the correlative I and Thou, one of the twin constituents
is to be taken as _plus_ will, the other as _minus_ will, so is it here;
and it is obvious that the reason or _super_-individual of each man,
whereby he is a man, is the factor we are to take as _minus_ will, and
that the individual will or personalising principle of free agency
(“arbitrement” is Milton’s word) is the factor marked _plus_ will; and
again, that as the identity or co-inherence of the absolute will and the
reason, is the peculiar character of God, so is the _synthesis_ of the
individual will and the common reason, by the subordination of the former
to the latter, the only possible likeness or image of the _prothesis_ or
identity, and therefore the required proper character of man.
Conscience, then, is a witness respecting the identity of the will and
the reason, effected by the self-subordination of the will or self to the
reason, as equal to or representing the will of God. But the personal
will is a factor in other moral _synthesis_, for example, appetite _plus_
personal will = sensuality; lust of power, _plus_ personal will =
ambition, and so on, equally as in the _synthesis_ on which the
conscience is grounded. Not this, therefore, but the other _synthesis_,
must supply the specific character of the conscience, and we must enter
into an analysis of reason. Such as the nature and objects of the reason
are, such must be the functions and objects of the conscience. And the
former we shall best learn by recapitulating those constituents of the
total man which are either contrary to or disparate from the reason.
I. Reason, and the proper objects of reason, are wholly alien from
sensation. Reason is supersensual, and its antagonist is appetite, and
the objects of appetite the lust of the flesh.
II. Reason and its objects do not appertain to the world of the senses,
inward or outward; that is, they partake not of sense or fancy. Reason
is supersensuous, and here its antagonist is the lust of the eye.
III. Reason and its objects are not things of reflection, association,
discursion, discourse in the old sense of the word as opposed to
intuition; “discursive or intuitive,” as Milton has it. Reason does not
indeed necessarily exclude the finite, either in time or in space, but it
includes them _eminenter_. Thus the prime mover of the material universe
is affirmed to contain all motion as its cause, but not to be, or to
suffer, motion in itself.
Reason is not the faculty of the finite. But here I must premise the
following. The faculty of the finite is that which reduces the confused
impressions of sense to their essential forms—quantity, quality,
relation, and in these action and reaction, cause and effect, and the
like; thus raises the materials furnished by the senses and sensations
into objects of reflection, and so makes experience possible. Without
it, man’s representative powers would be a delirium, a chaos, a scudding
cloudage of shapes; and it is therefore most appropriately called the
understanding, or substantiative faculty. Our elder metaphysicians, down
to Hobbes inclusively, called this likewise discourse, _discuvsus
discursio_, from its mode of action as not staying at any one object, but
running, as it were, to and fro to abstract, generalise, and classify.
Now when this faculty is employed in the service of the pure reason, it
brings out the necessary and universal truths contained in the infinite
into distinct contemplation by the pure act of the sensuous
imagination—that is, in the production of the forms of space and time
abstracted from all corporeity, and likewise of the inherent forms of the
understanding itself abstractedly from the consideration of particulars,
as in the case of geometry, numeral mathematics, universal logic, and
pure metaphysics. The discursive faculty then becomes what our
Shakespeare, with happy precision, calls “discourse of reason.”
We will now take up our reasoning again from the words “motion in
itself.”
It is evident, then, that the reason as the irradiative power, and the
representative of the infinite, judges the understanding as the faculty
of the finite, and cannot without error be judged by it. When this is
attempted, or when the understanding in its _synthesis_ with the personal
will, usurps the supremacy of the reason, or affects to supersede the
reason, it is then what St. Paul calls the mind of the flesh (φρόνημα
σαρκός), or the wisdom of this world. The result is, that the reason is
superfinite; and in this relation, its antagonist is the insubordinate
understanding, or mind of the flesh.
IV. Reason, as one with the absolute will (_In the beginning was the
Logos_, _and the Logos was with God_, _and the Logos was God_), and
therefore for man the certain representative of the will of God, is above
the will of man as an individual will. We have seen in III. that it
stands in antagonism to all mere particulars; but here it stands in
antagonism to all mere individual interests as so many selves, to the
personal will as seeking its objects in the manifestation of itself for
itself—_sit pro ratione voluntas_;—whether this be realised with
adjuncts, as in the lust of the flesh, and in the lust of the eye; or
without adjuncts, as in the thirst and pride of power, despotism,
egoistic ambition. The fourth antagonist, then, of reason, is the lust
of the will.
Corollary. Unlike a million of tigers, a million of men is very
different from a million times one man. Each man in a numerous society
is not only coexistent with, but virtually organised into, the multitude
of which he is an integral part. His _idem_ is modified by the _alter_.
And there arise impulses and objects from this _synthesis_ of the _alter
et idem_, myself and my neighbour. This, again, is strictly analogous to
what takes place in the vital organisation of the individual man. The
cerebral system of the nerves has its correspondent _antithesis_ in the
abdominal system: but hence arises a _synthesis_ of the two in the
pectoral system as the intermediate, and, like a drawbridge, at once
conductor and boundary. In the latter, as objectised by the former,
arise the emotions, the affections, and, in one word, the passions, as
distinguished from the cognitions and appetites. Now, the reason has
been shown to be superindividual, generally, and therefore not less so
when the form of an individualisation subsists in the _alter_ than when
it is confined to the _idem_; not less when the emotions have their
conscious or believed object in another, than when their subject is the
individual personal self. For though these emotions, affections,
attachments, and the like, are the prepared ladder by which the lower
nature is taken up into, and made to partake of, the highest room—as we
are taught to give a feeling of reality to the higher _per medium
commune_ with the lower, and thus gradually to see the reality of the
higher (namely, the objects of reason), and finally to know that the
latter are indeed, and pre-eminently real, as if you love your earthly
parents whom you see, by these means you will learn to love your Heavenly
Father who is invisible;—yet this holds good only so far as the reason is
the president, and its objects the ultimate aim; and cases may arise in
which the Christ as the Logos, or Redemptive Reason, declares, _He that
loves father or another more than Me_, _is not worthy of Me_; nay, he
that can permit his emotions to rise to an equality with the universal
reason, is in enmity with that reason. Here, then, reason appears as the
love of God; and its antagonist is the attachment to individuals wherever
it exists in diminution of, or in competition with, the love which is
reason.
In these five paragraphs I have enumerated and explained the several
powers or forces belonging or incidental to human nature, which in all
matters of reason the man is bound either to subjugate or subordinate to
reason. The application to faith follows of its own accord. The first
or most indefinite sense of faith is fidelity: then fidelity under
previous contract or particular moral obligation. In this sense faith is
fealty to a rightful superior: faith is the duty of a faithful subject to
a rightful governor. Then it is allegiance in active service; fidelity
to the liege lord under circumstances, and amid the temptations of
usurpation, rebellion, and intestine discord. Next we seek for that
rightful superior on our duties to whom all our duties to all other
superiors, on our faithfulness to whom all our bounden relations to all
other objects of fidelity, are founded. We must inquire after that duty
in which all others find their several degrees and dignities, and from
which they derive their obligative force. We are to find a superior,
whose rights, including our duties, are presented to the mind in the very
idea of that Supreme Being, whose sovereign prerogatives are predicates
implied in the subjects, as the essential properties of a circle are
co-assumed in the first assumption of a circle, consequently underived,
unconditional, and as rationally unsusceptible, so probably prohibitive,
of all further question. In this sense, then, faith is fidelity, fealty,
allegiance of the moral nature to God, in opposition to all usurpation,
and in resistance to all temptation to the placing any other claim above
or equal with our fidelity to God.
The will of God is the last ground and final aim of all our duties, and
to that the whole man is to be harmonised by subordination, subjugation,
or suppression alike in commission and omission. But the will of God,
which is one with the supreme intelligence, is revealed to man through
the conscience. But the conscience, which consists in an inappellable
bearing-witness to the truth and reality of our reason, may legitimately
be construed with the term reason, so far as the conscience is
prescriptive; while as approving or condemning, it is the consciousness
of the subordination or insubordination, the harmony or discord, of the
personal will of man to and with the representative of the will of God.
This brings me to the last and fullest sense of faith, that is, the
obedience of the individual will to the reason, in the lust of the flesh
as opposed to the supersensual; in the lust of the eye as opposed to the
supersensuous; in the pride of the understanding as opposed to the
infinite; in the φρόνημα σαρκός in contrariety to the spiritual truth; in
the lust of the personal will as opposed to the absolute and universal;
and in the love of the creature, as far as it is opposed to the love
which is one with the reason, namely, the love of God.
Thus, then, to conclude. Faith subsists in the _synthesis_ of the Reason
and the individual Will. By virtue of the latter therefore, it must be
an energy, and, inasmuch as it relates to the whole moral man, it must be
exerted in each and all of his constituents or incidents, faculties and
tendencies;—it must be a total, not a partial—a continuous, not a
desultory or occasional—energy. And by virtue of the former, that is
Reason, Faith must be a Light, a form of knowing, a beholding of truth.
In the incomparable words of the Evangelist, therefore, _Faith must be a
Light originating in the Logos_, _or the substantial Reason_, _which is
co-eternal and one with the Holy Will_, _and which Light is at the same
time the Life of men_. Now, as _Life_ is here the sum or collective of
all moral and spiritual acts, in suffering, doing, and being, so is Faith
the source and the sum, the energy and the principle of the fidelity of
man to God, by the subordination of his human Will, in all provinces of
his nature, to his Reason, as the sum of spiritual Truth, representing
and manifesting the Will Divine.