As soon as the consciousness of belief dawned upon the father, and the
effort to exercise it was put forth, there sprang up the consciousness
of its imperfection. He would never have known that he did not believe
unless he had tried to believe. So it is in regard to all excellences
and graces of character. The desire of possessing some feeble degree
of any virtue or excellence, and the effort to put it forth, is the
surest way of discovering how little of it we have. On the other side,
sorrow for the lack of some form of goodness is itself a proof of the
partial possession, in some rudimentary and incipient form, of that
goodness. The utterly lazy man never mourns over his idleness; it is
only the one that would fain work harder than he does, and already
works tolerably hard, who does so. So the little spark of faith in
this man's heart, like a taper in a cavern, showed the abysses of
darkness that lay unillumined round about it.
Thus, then, in its infancy, faith may and does coexist with much
unfaith and doubt. The same state of mind, looked at from its two
opposite ends, as it were, may be designated faith or unbelief; just
as a piece of shot silk, according to the angle at which you hold it,
may show you only the bright colours of its warp or the dark ones of
its weft. When you are travelling in a railway train with the sun
streaming in at the windows, if you look out on the one hand you will
see the illumined face of every tree and blade of grass and house; and
if you look out on the other, you will see their shadowed side. And so
the same landscape may seem to be all lit up by the sunshine of
belief, or to be darkened by the gloom of distrust. If we consider how
great and how perfect ought to be our confidence, to bear any due
proportion to the firmness of that upon which it is built, we shall
not be slow to believe that through life there will always be the
presence in us, more or less, of these two elements. There will be all
degrees of progress between the two extremes of infantile and mature
faith.
There follows from that thought this practical lesson, that the
discovery of much unbelief should never make a man doubt the reality
or genuineness of his little faith. We are all apt to write needlessly
bitter things against ourselves when we get a glimpse of the
incompleteness of our Christian life and character. But there is no
reason why a man should fancy that he is a hypocrite because he finds
out that he is not a perfect believer. But, on the other hand, let us
remember that the main thing is not the maturity, but the progressive
character, of faith. It was most natural that this man in our text, at
the very first moment when he began to put his confidence in Jesus
Christ as able to heal his child, should be aware of much
tremulousness mingling with it. But is it not most unnatural that
there should be the same relative proportion of faith and unbelief in
the heart and experience of men who have long professed to be
Christians? You do not expect the infant to have adult limbs, but you
do expect it to grow. True, faith at its beginning may be like a grain
of mustard seed, but if the grain of mustard seed be alive it will
grow to a great tree, where all the fowls of the air can lodge in the
branches. Oh! it is a crying shame and sin that in all Christian
communities there should be so many grey-headed babies, men who have
for years and years been professing to be Christ's followers, and
whose faith is but little, if at all, stronger--nay! perhaps is even
obviously weaker--than it was in the first days of their profession.
'Ye have need of milk, and not of strong meat,' very many of you. And
the vitality of your faith is made suspicious, not because it is
feeble, but because it is not growing stronger.