You cannot tell much about a man's faith by his willingness to deal in
futures without any foundation in fact. And yet no man is ready to
face the future unless his heart is nerved by a high and worthy faith.
This alone can give strength to look down the coming days and to take
up their tasks.
None of us can know what these new days hold for us; fear readily
conjures up pictures of disaster. But because of certain sublime
confidences we hold we banish our fears, shake off our sloth, and
gladly step out into the unknown and untrodden country of to-morrow.
Faith is the force of all the ages. It accounts for the past; it
enters and determines the future. Because certain men in days gone by
believed certain things intensely; because they were thrilled by great
visions, by glorious ideals, history was wrought out in the forge of
their convictions, under the hammer of their wills.
No great things are done except by the power of faith, under glowing
hopes and compelling convictions. It is her faith in her boy's future
that makes the mother willing to suffer, keeps her patient, that buoys
up the father in the strife and weariness of life. No man or woman is
doing anything that makes the world richer for mere bread and butter;
some purpose and vision is behind the worthy work.
It is because somehow we believe, no matter how we may phrase the
belief, that destiny is behind this strange weaving we call life that
we are content to seem to be the shuttles jerked hither and thither.
We bear the ills of to-day because we dimly see the glorious goal of
the good of all. We do a full day's work only as we see somehow an
eternal wage.
It makes little difference what creed a man may hold, for that has
become almost wholly a matter of philosophical speculation regarding
things unknown and often unimportant, but it makes all the difference
what measure and quality of faith he has, whether he feels the force of
great aspirations and is controlled by eternal principles.
It may belong to few of us to be heralded as heroes, and the judgment
of history may confer on none the martyr's crown, but the hero's joy
and the martyr's glory are in the heart of every one who boldly reaches
up to and lives out the highest he conceives, for he will not do that
without sacrifice and pain on his side nor without enriching for
mankind on the other.
The largest faith may be manifest in the lowliest places. When all the
work of the ages appears, when the weaving of the centuries is turned
with its finished side towards us, we may see that the man who has laid
the brick or fed the furnace or the woman who has washed and cooked in
the home and tended the little ones, doing these things for love, has
shot the most glowing colours into the great fabric.
It is not the thing you do so much as the spirit in which you do it
that makes it great or small. Faith determines this spirit, for faith
is that which fashions the ideal of the one we love, the ideal we serve
and for which we joyfully suffer. The prophet whose burning words
cannot forget lives by the faith in a vision broad and sweeping; but
not less is the faith of the humble toiler who lives each day by the
vision of his home and fireside.
Nor is this all. It is faith that draws on life's invisible sources of
power and refreshing; it is faith that finds inner contact with the
invisible. How empty is life if it hold nothing but things; how hungry
grows the heart fed only on cold facts. For each day as it comes we
need to be able to draw on the deep springs of the water of life, the
springs from which our fathers drank and found strength to lay the
foundations of our day.
Faith is not the blind confidence that, somehow, Providence will send
us daily bread. It is the faculty by which the heart eats of the bread
of heaven, by which it comes into fellowship with the great and
immortal of all ages, by which it walks with Jesus of Nazareth and
every spirit like His and learns to read life as love law and see it as
leading to eternal good.