In the recently published Life by Leslie Stephen of his brother,
Fitz-James, there is an account of a school to which the latter went
when he was a boy. The teacher, a certain Mr. Guest, used to converse
with his pupils in this wise: "Gurney, what is the difference between
justification and sanctification?--Stephen, prove the omnipotence of
God!" etc. In the midst of our Harvard freethinking and indifference
we are prone to imagine that here at your good old orthodox College
conversation continues to be somewhat upon this order; and to show you
that we at Harvard have not lost all interest in these vital subjects,
I have brought with me to-night something like a sermon on
justification by faith to read to you,--I mean an essay in
justification _of_ faith, a defence of our right to adopt a believing
attitude in religious matters, in spite of the fact that our merely
logical {2} intellect may not have been coerced. 'The Will to
Believe,' accordingly, is the title of my paper.
I have long defended to my own students the lawfulness of voluntarily
adopted faith; but as soon as they have got well imbued with the
logical spirit, they have as a rule refused to admit my contention to
be lawful philosophically, even though in point of fact they were
personally all the time chock-full of some faith or other themselves.
I am all the while, however, so profoundly convinced that my own
position is correct, that your invitation has seemed to me a good
occasion to make my statements more clear. Perhaps your minds will be
more open than those with which I have hitherto had to deal. I will be
as little technical as I can, though I must begin by setting up some
technical distinctions that will help us in the end.