Faith a Road to Truth
DAILY READINGS
Many minds are prevented from even a fair consideration of religious
faith by prejudices which spring, not from reasoned argument, but from
practical experience. They are biased before argument has begun; they
_feel_ that faith means credulity, and that religious faith in
particular is a surrender of reason. Before we positively present
faith as an indispensable means of dealing with reality in any realm,
let us, in the daily readings, consider some of the practical
experiences and attitudes that thus prejudice men against religion.
Second Week, First Day
Many men are biased in advance by the _unwise treatment to which in
their childhood they were subjected_. Paul pictures the home life of
Timothy as ideal:
=I thank God, whom I serve from my forefathers in a pure conscience,
how unceasing is my remembrance of thee in my supplications, night
and day longing to see thee, remembering thy tears, that I may be
filled with joy; having been reminded of the unfeigned faith that is
in thee; which dwelt first in thy grandmother Lois, and thy mother
Eunice; and, I am persuaded, in thee also.--II Tim. 1:3-5.=
"Unfeigned faith" is often thus a family heritage, handed down by
vital contagion. But in many homes religion is not thus beautifully
presented to the children; it is a hard and rigorous affair of dogma
and restraint. "Oh, why," said a young professional man, whom
Professor Coe quotes, "why did my parents try to equip me with a
doctrinal system in childhood? I supposed that the whole system must
be believed on pain of losing my religion altogether. And so, when I
began to doubt some points, I felt obliged to throw all overboard. I
have found my way back to positive religion, but by what a long and
bitter struggle!" If, however, one has been so unfortunate as to be
hardened in youth by unwise training, is it reasonable on that account
forever to shut himself out from the most glorious experience of man?
This complaint about mistreatment in youth is often an excuse, not a
reason for irreligion. Says Phillips Brooks: "I have grown familiar to
weariness with the self-excuse of men who say, 'Oh, if I had not had
the terrors of the law so preached to me when I was a boy, if I had
not been so confronted with the woes of hell and the awfulness of the
judgment day, I should have been religious long ago.' My friends, I
think I never hear a meaner or a falser speech than that. Men may
believe it when they say it--I suppose they do--but it is not true. It
is unmanly, I think. It is throwing on their teaching and their
teachers, or their fathers and their mothers, the fault which belongs
to their own neglect, because they have never taken up the earnest
fight with sin and sought through every obstacle for truth and God. It
has the essential vice of dogmatism about it, for it claims that a
different _view_ of God would have done for them that which no view of
God can do, that which must be done, _under any system, any teaching_,
by humility and penitence and struggle and self-sacrifice. Without
these no teaching saves the soul. With these, under any teaching, the
soul must find its Father."
_O Thou, who didst lay the foundations of the earth amid the singing
of the morning stars and the joyful shouts of the sons of God, lift
up our little life into Thy gladness. Out of Thee, as out of an
overflowing fountain of Love, wells forth eternally a stream of
blessing upon every creature Thou hast made. If we have thought that
Thou didst call into being this universe in order to win praise and
honor for Thyself, rebuke the vain fancies of our foolish minds and
show us that Thy glory is the joy of giving. We can give Thee nothing
of our own. All that we have is Thine. Oh, then, help us to glorify
Thee by striving to be like Thee. Make us just and pure and good as
Thou art. May we be partakers of the Divine Nature, so that all that
is truly human in us may be deepened, purified, and strengthened.
And so may we be witnesses for Thee, lights of the world, reflecting
Thy light._
_Help us to make religion a thing so beautiful that all men may be
won to surrender to its power. Let us manifest in our lives its
sweetness and excellency, its free and ennobling spirit. Forbid that
we should go up and down the world with melancholy looks and dejected
visage, lest we should repel men from entering Thy Kingdom. Rather,
may we walk in the freedom and joy of faith, and with Thy new song in
our mouths, so that men looking on us may learn to trust and to love
Thee. Amen._--Samuel McComb.
Second Week, Second Day
Many men are prejudiced against religion during their youthful
_period of revolt against authority_. Listen to an ancient father
talking with his sons:
=Hear, my sons, the instruction of a father,
And attend to know understanding:
For I give you good doctrine;
Forsake ye not my law.
For I was a son unto my father,
Tender and only beloved in the sight of my mother.
And he taught me, and said unto me:
Let thy heart retain my words;
Keep my commandments, and live;
Get wisdom, get understanding;
Forget not, neither decline from the words of my mouth;
Forsake her not, and she will preserve thee;
Love her, and she will keep thee.
Wisdom is the principal thing; therefore get wisdom;
Yea, with all thy getting get understanding.
Exalt her, and she will promote thee;
She will bring thee to honor, when thou dost embrace her.
She will give to thy head a chaplet of grace;
A crown of beauty will she deliver to thee.=
=--Prov. 4:1-9.=
No father can read this urgent, anxious plea without understanding the
reason for its solicitude. Every boy comes to the time when he breaks
away from parental authority and begins to take his life into his own
hands. It is one of youth's great crises, and the spirit of it is
sometimes harsh and rebellious. So Carlyle describes his own
experience: "Such transitions are ever full of pain: thus the Eagle
when he moults is sickly; and, to attain his new beak, must harshly
dash-off the old one upon rocks." For religious faith this period of
life is always critical. Stevenson in his revolt, when he called
respectability "the deadliest gag and wet-blanket that can be laid on
man," also became, as he said, "a youthful atheist." How many have
traveled that road and stopped in the negation! Stevenson did not
stop, and years afterward wrote of his progress: "Because I have
reached Paris, I am not ashamed of having passed through Newhaven and
Dieppe." Surely if anyone has been "a youthful atheist," it was an
experience to be "passed through."
_O God, we turn to Thee in the faith that Thou dost understand and
art very merciful. Some of us are not sure concerning Thee; not sure
what Thou art; not sure that Thou art at all. Yet there is something
at work behind our minds, in times of stillness we hear it, like a
distant song; there is something in the sky at evening-time;
something in the face of man. We feel that round our incompleteness
flows Thy greatness, round our restlessness Thy rest. Yet this is not
enough._
_We want a heart to speak to, a heart that understands; a friend to
whom we can turn, a breast on which we may lean. O that we could find
Thee! Yet could we ever think these things unless Thou hadst inspired
us, could we ever want these things unless Thou Thyself wert very
near?_
_Some of us know full well; but we are sore afraid. We dare not yield
ourselves to Thee, for we fear what that might mean. Our foolish
freedom, our feeble pleasures, our fatal self-indulgence suffice to
hold us back from Thee, though Thou art our very life, and we so sick
and needing Thee. Our freedom has proved false, our pleasures have
long since lost their zest, our sins, oh how we hate them!_
_Come and deliver us, for we have lost all hope in ourselves.
Amen._--W. E. Orchard.
Second Week, Third Day
Some men--often the precocious, clever ones--are biased against
religion because _in youth they accepted an immature philosophy of
life and have never changed it_. The crust forms too soon on some
minds, and if it forms during the period of youthful revolt, they are
definitely prejudiced against religious truth. The difference between
such folk and the great believers is not that the believers had no
doubts, but that they did not fix their final thought of life until
more mature experience had come. They fulfilled the admonition of a
wise father to keep up a tireless search for truth:
=My son, if thou wilt receive my words,
And lay up my commandments with thee;
So as to incline thine ear unto wisdom,
And apply thy heart to understanding;
Yea, if thou cry after discernment,
And lift up thy voice for understanding;
If thou seek her as silver,
And search for her as for hid treasures:
Then shalt thou understand the fear of Jehovah,
And find the knowledge of God.=
=--Prov. 2:1-5.=
Mrs. Charles Kingsley, for example, says of her husband that at twenty
"He was full of religious doubts; and his face, with its unsatisfied,
hungering, and at times defiant look, bore witness to the state of his
mind." At twenty-one Kingsley himself wrote: "You believe that you
have a sustaining Hand to guide you along that path, an Invisible
Protection and an unerring Guide. I, alas! have no stay for my weary
steps, but that same abused and stupefied reason which has stumbled
and wandered, and betrayed me a thousand times ere now, and is every
moment ready to faint and to give up the unequal struggle." If
Kingsley had framed his final philosophy then, what a loss to the
world of an inspiring life transfigured by Christian faith! He cried
after discernment, lifted up his voice for understanding, and he found
the knowledge of God. Many a man ought to revise in the light of
mature experience and thought a hasty irreligious guess at life's
meaning which he made in youth.
_O Father, we turn to Thee because we are sore vexed with our own
thoughts. Our minds plague us with questionings we cannot answer; we
are driven to voyage on strange seas of thought alone. Dost Thou
disturb our minds with endless questioning, yet keep the answers
hidden in Thy heart, so that away from Thee we should always be
perplexed, and by thoughts derived from Thee be ever drawn to Thee?
Surely, our God, it must be so._
_But still more bitter and humbling, O Father, is our experience of
failure, so frequent, tragic, and unpardonable. We have struggled on
in vain, resolves are broken ere they pass our lips; we can see no
hope of better things, we can never forgive ourselves; and after all
our prayers our need remains and our sense of coming short but
deepens. Yet, at least we know that we have failed, and how, if
something higher than ourselves were not at work within?_
_Our desperate desires have driven us at last to Thee, conscious now,
after all vain effort, that it is Thyself alone can satisfy, and now
at peace to know that Thou it is who art desired, because Thou it is
who dost desire within us. Beyond our need reveal Thyself, its cause
and cure; in all desire teach us to discern Thy drawing near.
Amen._--W. E. Orchard.
Second Week, Fourth Day
Men are often prejudiced against religion because _the churches
which they happened to attend in youth urged on them an irrational
faith_. Some men never recover from the idea that all religion
everywhere must always be the same kind of religion against which in
youth their good sense rose in revolt; they are in perpetual rebellion
against religion as it was when they broke with it a generation ago.
But if one thing more than another grows, expands, becomes in the
intelligent and pure increasingly pure and intelligent, it is religion.
Consider an early Hebrew idea of God:
=And it came to pass on the way at the lodging-place, that Jehovah
met him, and sought to kill him. Then Zipporah took a flint, and cut
off the foreskin of her son, and cast it at his feet; and she said,
Surely a bridegroom of blood art thou to me. So he let him alone.
Then she said, A bridegroom of blood art thou, because of the
circumcision.--Exodus 4:24-26.=
Over against so abhorrent a picture of a deity who would have
committed murder, had not a mother swiftly circumcised her son,
consider a later thought of God:
=How think ye? if any man have a hundred sheep, and one of them be
gone astray, doth he not leave the ninety and nine, and go unto the
mountains, and seek that which goeth astray? And if so be that he
find it, verily I say unto you, he rejoiceth over it more than over
the ninety and nine which have not gone astray. Even so it is not the
will of your Father who is in heaven, that one of these little ones
should perish.--Matt. 18:12-14.=
So religion grows with man's capacity to receive higher, finer
revelations of the divine. And in no age of the world has so great a
change passed over the intellectual framework of faith as in the
generation just gone. To live in protest against forms of belief a
generation old is fighting men of straw; the vanguard of religious
thought and life has pushed ahead many a mile beyond the point of such
attack. Men who threw away the living water of the Gospel because they
disliked the water-buckets in which their boyhood churches presented
it, are living spiritually thirsty lives when there is no reasonable
need of their doing so. There is many an unbeliever with a "God-shaped
blank" in his heart, who could be a confident and joyful believer if
he only knew what religion means to men of faith today.
_O God, who hast formed all hearts to love Thee, made all ways to
lead to Thy face, created all desire to be unsatisfied save in Thee;
with great compassion look upon us gathered here. Our presence is our
prayer, our need the only plea we dare to claim, Thy purposes the one
assurance we possess._
_Some of us are very confused; we do not know why we were ever born,
for what end we should live, which way we should take. But we are
willing to be guided. Take our trembling hands in Thine, and lead us
on._
_Some of us are sore within. We long for love and friendship, but we
care for no one and we feel that no one cares for us. We are
misunderstood, we are lonely, we have been disappointed, we have lost
our faith in man and our faith in life. Wilt Thou not let us love
Thee who first loved us?_
_Some of us are vexed with passions that affright us; to yield to
them would mean disaster, to restrain them is beyond our power, and
nothing earth contains exhausts their vehemence or satisfies their
fierce desire._
_And so because there is no answer, no end or satisfaction in
ourselves; and because we are what we are, and yet long to be so
different; we believe Thou art, and that Thou dost understand us. By
faith we feel after Thee, through love we find the way, in hope we
bring ourselves to Thee. Amen._--W. E. Orchard.
Second Week, Fifth Day
Many minds are prejudiced against religion because, having gone so far
as to feel the credulity of religious belief, they have never gone
further and _seen the credulity of religious unbelief_. Irreligion
implies a creed just as surely as religion does; and many a man's
return to faith has begun when his faculties of doubt, which hitherto
had been used only against belief in God, became active against belief
in no-God. Mr. Gilbert Chesterton, with his characteristic vividness
and exaggeration, narrates such an experience: "I never read a line of
Christian apologetics. I read as little as I can of them now. It was
Huxley and Herbert Spencer and Bradlaugh who brought me back to
orthodox theology. They sowed in my mind my first wild doubts of
doubt. Our grandmothers were quite right when they said that Tom Paine
and the free-thinkers unsettled the mind. They do. They unsettled mine
horribly. The rationalist made me question whether reason was of any
use whatever; and when I had finished Herbert Spencer I had got as far
as doubting (for the first time) whether evolution had occurred at
all. As I laid down the last of Colonel Ingersoll's atheistic lectures
the dreadful thought broke across my mind, 'Almost thou persuadest me
to be a Christian.' I was in a desperate way." Lest Mr. Chesterton's
whimsicality may hide the seriousness of such an experience, we may
add that Robert Louis Stevenson's first break with his "youthful
atheism" came when, under the influence of Professor Fleeming Jenkin,
he too began to have his "first wild doubts of doubt." He began
thinking, as he says, that "certainly the church was not right, but
certainly not the anti-church either." Many a man has played unfairly
with his doubts; he has used them against religion, but not against
irreligion. When he is thorough with his doubts he may join the many
who understand what the apostle meant when he wrote to Timothy:
=O Timothy, guard that which is committed unto thee, turning away
from the profane babblings and oppositions of the knowledge which is
falsely so called; which some professing have erred concerning the
faith.=
=Grace be with you.--1 Tim. 6:20, 21.=
_O God, too near to be found, too simple to be conceived, too good to
be believed; help us to trust, not in our knowledge of Thee, but in
Thy knowledge of us; to be certain of Thee, not because we feel our
thoughts of Thee are true, but because we know how far Thou dost
transcend them. May we not be anxious to discern Thy will, but
content only with desire to do it; may we not strain our minds to
understand Thy nature, but yield ourselves and live our lives only to
express Thee._
_Shew us how foolish it is to doubt Thee, since Thou Thyself dost set
the questions which disturb us; reveal our unbelief to be faith
fretting at its outworn form. Be gracious when we are tempted to
cease from moral strife: reveal what it is that struggles in us.
Before we tire of mental search enable us to see that it was not
ourselves but Thy call which stirred our souls._
_Turn us back from our voyages of thought to that which sent us
forth. Teach us to trust not to cleverness or learning, but to that
inward faith which can never be denied. Lead us out of confusion to
simplicity. Call us back from wandering without to find Thee at home
within. Amen._--W. E. Orchard.
Second Week, Sixth Day
Many men are biased in favor of their habitual doubt because they do
not see that _positive faith is the only normal estate of man_.
We live not by the things of which we are uncertain, but by the things
which we verily believe. Columbus doubted many of the old views in
geography, but these negations did not make him great; his greatness
sprang from the positive beliefs which he confidently held and on
which he launched his splendid adventure. Goethe is right when he
makes Mephistopheles, his devil, say, "I am the spirit of negation,"
for negation, save as it paves the way for positive conviction, always
bedevils life. The psalmist reveals the ideal experience for every
doubter.
First, _uncertainty_:
=But as for me, my feet were almost gone;
My steps had well nigh slipped.
For I was envious at the arrogant,
When I saw the prosperity of the wicked.=
=--Psalm 73:2, 3.=
Then _vision_:
=When I thought how I might know this,
It was too painful for me;
Until I went into the sanctuary of God,
And considered their latter end.=
=--Psalm 73:16, 17.=
Then, _positive assurance_:
=Thou wilt guide me with thy counsel,
And afterward receive me to glory.
Whom have I in heaven but thee?
And there is none upon earth that I desire besides thee.
My flesh and my heart faileth;
But God is the strength of my heart and my portion for ever.=
=--Psalm 73:24-26.=
Doubt, therefore, does have real value in life; it clears away rubbish
and stimulates search for truth; but it has no value unless it is
finally swallowed up in positive assurance. So Tennyson pictures the
experience of his friend, Arthur Hallam:
"One indeed I knew
In many a subtle question versed,
Who touch'd a jarring lyre at first,
But ever strove to make it true:
Perplext in faith, but pure in deeds,
At last he beat his music out.
There lives more faith in honest doubt,
Believe me, than in half the creeds.
He fought his doubts and gather'd strength,
He would not make his judgment blind,
He faced the spectres of the mind
And laid them: thus he came at length
To find a stronger faith his own."
_O Most Merciful, whose love to us is mighty, long-suffering, and
infinitely tender; lead us beyond all idols and imaginations of our
minds to contact with Thee the real and abiding; past all barriers of
fear and beyond all paralysis of failure to that furnace of flaming
purity where falsehood, sin, and cowardice are all consumed away. It
may be that we know not what we ask; yet we dare not ask for less._
_Our aspirations are hindered because we do not know ourselves. We
have tried to slake our burning thirst at broken cisterns, to comfort
the crying of our spirits with baubles and trinkets, to assuage the
pain of our deep unrest by drugging an accusing conscience, believing
a lie, and veiling the naked flame that burns within. But now we know
Thou makest us never to be content with aught save Thyself, in earth,
or heaven, or hell._
_Sometimes we have sought Thee in agony and tears, scanned the clouds
and watched the ways of men, considered the stars and studied the
moral law; and returned from all our search no surer and no nearer.
Yet now we know that the impulse to seek Thee came from Thyself
alone, and what we sought for was the image Thou hadst first planted
in our hearts._
_We may not yet hold Thee fast or feel Thee near, but we know Thou
holdest us. All is well. Amen._--W. E. Orchard.
Second Week, Seventh Day
Men are often prejudiced against religion or any serious consideration
of it, because they _never have felt any vital need of God_. To study
wireless telegraphy in the safe seclusion of a college laboratory is
one thing; to hear the wireless apparatus on a floundering ship send
out its call for help across a stormy sea is quite a different matter.
Many folk have never thought of faith in God save with a mild,
intellectual curiosity; they do not know those deep experiences of
serious souls with sin and sorrow and anxiety, with burden for
great causes and desire for triumphant righteousness in men and
nations--experiences that throw men back on God as their only
sufficient refuge and hope. _Men never really find God until they need
him_; and some men never feel the need of him until life plunges them
into a shattering experience. Even in scientific research new
discoveries are made because men _want_ them, and Mayer, lighting on a
theory that proved to be of great value, says, "Engaged during a sea
voyage almost exclusively with the study of physiology, I discovered
the new theory, for the sufficient reason that I _vividly felt the
need of it_." How much more must the vital discovery of God depend on
life's conscious demand for him! And how certainly a shallow,
frivolous nature, unstirred by the deep concerns of life, is biased
against any serious interest in religious faith! Great believers have
first of all _thirsted_ for God.
=Ho, every one that thirsteth, come ye to the waters, and he that
hath no money; come ye, buy, and eat; yea, come, buy wine and milk
without money and without price. Wherefore do ye spend money for that
which is not bread? and your labor for that which satisfieth not?
hearken diligently unto me, and eat ye that which is good, and let
your soul delight itself in fatness. Incline your ear, and come unto
me; hear, and your soul shall live: and I will make an everlasting
covenant with you, even the sure mercies of David.... Seek ye Jehovah
while he may be found; call ye upon him while he is near: let the
wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts; and let
him return unto Jehovah, and he will have mercy upon him; and to our
God, for he will abundantly pardon.--Isa. 55:1-3, 6, 7.=
_Grant unto us, we pray Thee, the lost hunger and thirst after
righteousness--the longing for God. Grant unto us that drawing power
by which everything that is in us shall call out for Thee. Become
necessary unto us. With the morning and evening light, at noon and at
midnight, may we feel the need of Thy companionship.... Though Thou
dost not speak as man speaks, yet Thou canst call out to us; and the
soul shall know Thy presence, and shall understand by its own self
what Thou meanest. Grant unto us this witness of the Spirit, this
communion of the soul with Thee--and not only once or twice: may we
abide in the light._
_Thou hast come unto Thine own; and even as of old, Thine own know
Thee not, and believe Thee not. How many are there that have learned
Thy name upon their mother's knee, but have forgotten it! How many
are there that grew up into the happiness of a childhood in which
piety presided, but have gone away, and have not come back again to
their first love and to their early faith! How many are there
marching on now in the Sahara of indifference and in the wilderness
of unbelief!... Lord, look upon them; have merciful thoughts toward
them, and issue those gracious influences of power by which what is
best in them shall lift itself up and bear witness against that which
is worst. Amen._--Henry Ward Beecher.
COMMENT FOR THE WEEK
I
We are to deal in this chapter with one of the most common experiences
of doubt and are to attempt the statement of a truth useful in meeting
it. Many minds are undone at the first symptoms of religious
uncertainty, because they suppose that their doubt is philosophical,
and they feel a paralyzing inability to deal with philosophy at all.
As men have been known to take to their beds at hearing the scientific
names of illnesses which hitherto they had patiently endured, so minds
are sometimes overwhelmed by an unsettlement of faith that takes the
name of philosophic doubt. It is well, then, early in our study, to
note the homely, familiar experience, which in most cases underlies
and helps to explain the problem of theological unrest.
We all began, as children, with an unlimited ability to believe what
we were told. We were credulous long before we became critical. God
and Santa Claus, fairy stories and life after death--in what
beautiful, unquestioning confusion we received them all! Our thinking
was altogether imitative, as our talking was. From the existence of
Kamchatka to the opinion that it was wrong to lie, we had no
independent knowledge of our own. Reliance on authority was our only
road to truth. One prescription was adequate for every need of
information: ask our parents and be told.
This situation was the occasion of our first unsettlement of faith: we
discovered the fallibility of our parents. They failed to tell us what
we asked, or we found to be untrue what they had said, or they
themselves confessed how much they did not know. To some this was a
shock, the memory of which has never been forgotten. Edmund Gosse, the
literary critic, tells us that up to his sixth year he thought that
his father knew everything. Then came the fateful crisis when his
father wrongly reported an incident which Edmund himself had
witnessed. "Nothing could possibly have been more trifling to my
parents," he writes, "but to me it meant an epoch. Here was the
appalling discovery never suspected before that my father was not as
God and did not know everything. The shock was not caused by any
suspicion that he was not telling the truth, as it appeared to him,
but by the awful proof that he was not, as I had supposed,
omniscient." By most of us, however, the transfer of our faith from
our parents' authority to some other basis of belief was easily
accomplished. We found ourselves resting back on the priest or the
church or the creed or the Bible. Still our convictions were not
independently our own; we had never fought for them or thought them
through; they were founded on the say-so of authority. What we wished
to know we asked another, and what was told us we implicitly believed.
The time inevitably comes, however, to a normally developing mind,
when such an attitude of unquestioning credulity becomes impossible.
The curious "Why?" of the growing child, that began in early years to
besiege all statements of fact, now ranges out to call in question the
propositions of religious faith. For long-accepted truths, from the
rotundity of the earth to the existence of God, the enlarging
intellect wants reasons rather than dogmas. So normal is this period
of interrogation that it is regularly slated on the timetables of
psychological development. Starbuck fixes the average age of the doubt
period at about eighteen years for boys and about fifteen for girls.
At whatever time and in whatever special form this period of doubt
arises, the characteristic quality of its outcome is easily described.
In the end the fully awakened mind is ill content to accept any
authoritative statements that he dare not question or deny. He resents
having a quotation from any source waved like a revolver in his face
with the demand that he throw up his intellectual hands. No more in
religion than in politics does he incline to stand before infallibility,
like the French peasants before Louis XI, saying, "Sire, what are our
opinions?" He claims his right to question everything, to make every
truth advance and give the countersign of reasonableness, to weigh all
propositions in the scales of his own thinking, and if he is to love
the Lord his God at all, to do it, not with all his credulity, but, as
Jesus said, with all his mind.
Biography reveals how many of the great believers have passed through
this youthful period of rebellion against accepted tradition and have
suffered serious religious unsettlement in the process. Robert
Browning tells us that as a boy he was "passionately religious." When
his period of questioning and revolt arrived, however, it carried him
so far that he was publicly rebuked in church for intentional
misbehavior, and in his sixteenth year, under the influence of
Shelley's "Queen Mab," he declared himself an atheist. But in his
"Pauline," written when he was twenty-one, the direction in which his
quest was leading him was plain:
"I have always had one lode-star; now
As I look back, I see that I have halted
Or hastened as I looked towards that star--
A need, a trust, a yearning after God."
And when he grew to his maturity, had left his early credulousness
with the revolt that followed it far behind and had used his
independent thinking to productive purpose, from what a height of
splendid faith did he look back upon that youthful period of storm and
stress which he called "the passionate, impatient struggles of a boy
toward truth and love"!
Henry Ward Beecher's intellectual revolution was postponed until he
had entered the theological seminary. "I was then twenty years old,"
he writes, "and there came a great revulsion in me from all this
inchoate, unregulated, undirected experience. My mind took one
tremendous spring over into scepticism, and I said: 'I have been a
fool long enough--I will not stir one step further than I can see my
way, and I will not stand a moment where I cannot see the truth. I
will have something that is sure and steadfast.' Having taken that
ground, I was in that state of mind for the larger part of two years."
A wholesome restraint upon the wild perversions, the anarchic denials,
the abysmal despairs of this period of life is the clear recognition
that in some form it is one of the commonest experiences of man.
II
The treatment accorded to a youth who is passing through this
difficult adjustment often determines, in a fine or lamentable way,
his subsequent attitude towards religion. _Negative repression of real
questions is of all methods the most fatal, whether it be practiced on
the youth by others or by the youth upon himself._ "I have not been in
church for twenty years," said a college graduate. "Why?" was the
inquiry. "Because in college I learned from geology through how many
ages this earth was slowly being built. Troubled by the conflict
between this new knowledge and my early training, I went to my
minister. He said that the Bible told us the earth was made in six
days and that I must accept that on faith. That's why." Thousands of
men are religious wrecks today because, when the issue was raised in
their thinking between their desire for a reason and their traditional
beliefs, they were told that to ask a reason is sin. George Eliot's
experience unhappily is not unique. Just when in girlhood her mind was
waking to independent thought, a book now long unread, Hennell's
"Inquiry Concerning the Origin of Christianity," convinced her
immature judgment that her early credulity had been blind. No one was
at hand to state the faith in a reasonable way or to meet, not by
denying but by using her right to think, the attacks of Hennell, which
now are forgotten in their futility. She never came through her
youthful unsettlement. Years after, F. W. H. Myers wrote: "I remember
how at Cambridge I walked with her once in the Fellows' Garden of
Trinity, on an evening of rainy May, and she, stirred somewhat beyond
her wont, and taking as her text the three words which have been used
so often as the inspiring trumpet calls of men--the words God,
Immortality, Duty--pronounced with terrible earnestness, how
inconceivable was the first, how unbelievable was the second, and how
peremptory and absolute the third. Never, perhaps, had sterner accents
affirmed the sovereignty of impersonal and unrecompensing law. I
listened and night fell; her grave, majestic countenance turned toward
me like a Sibyl's in the gloom; it was as though she withdrew from my
grasp one by one the two scrolls of promise, and left me the third
scroll only, awful with inevitable fate."
In this period of readjustment, whether one is the youth in the midst
of the struggle or the solicitous friend endeavoring to help, one most
needs a clear perception of the ideal outcome of such intellectual
unrest. Let us attempt a picture of that ideal. The youth who long has
taken on his parents' say-so the most important convictions that the
soul can hold, or who, with no care to think or question for himself,
has looked to Book or Church for all that he believed about God, now
feels within him that intellectual awakening that cannot be quieted by
mere authority. He long has taken his truth preserved by others'
hands; now he desires to pick it for himself, fresh from the living
tree of knowledge. His declaration of independence from subjection to
his parents or his Church is not at first irreverent desire to
disbelieve; it is rather desire to enter into the Samaritans'
experience when they said to the woman who first had told them about
Jesus: "Now we believe, not because of _thy_ speaking; for we have
_heard for ourselves_, and know that this is indeed the Saviour of the
world" (John 4:41). The youth turns from second-hand rehearsal of the
truth to seek a first-hand, original acquaintance with it. As he began
in utter financial dependence on his father, then made a bit of
spending money of his own, and at last moved out to make his living,
ashamed to be a pensioner and parasite when he should be carrying
himself, so from his old, intellectual dependence the youth passes to
a fine responsibility for his own thinking and belief. He knows that
such transitions, whether financial or intellectual, generally mean
stress and perplexity, but if he is to be a man the youth must
venture.
In this transition beliefs will certainly be modified. Not only do
forms of religious thinking shift and change with the passing
generations, but individuals differ in their powers to see and
understand. Religious faith, like water, takes shape from the
receptacles into whose unique nooks and crannies it is poured. If the
truth which the youth possesses is to be indeed his own, it will
surely differ from the truth which once he learned, by as much as his
mind and his experience differ from his father's. Even in the New
Testament one can easily distinguish James' thought from Paul's and
John's from Peter's. But change of form need not mean loss of value.
To pass by fine gradations from unquestioning credulity to thoughtful
faith is not impossible. Thus a boy learns to swim with his father's
hands beneath him and passes so gradually from reliance upon another
to independent power to swim alone that he cannot tell when first the
old support was quietly withdrawn.
Thus ideally pictured, this transition is nothing to be feared; it is
one of life's steps to spiritual power. This period of questioning and
venture we have called the passage from credulity to independence, but
its significance is deeper than those words imply. _It is the passage
from hearsay to reality._ Of all inward intimate experiences, religion
reaches deepest and is least transferable. It is as incommunicable as
friendship. A father may commend a comrade to his son and lay bare his
own deep friendship with the man, but if the son himself does not see
the value there nor for himself in loyalty and love make self
surrender, the father can do nothing more. Friendship cannot be
carried on by proxy. One can as easily breathe for another as in
another's place be loyal to a friend or trust in God.
When, therefore, the youth moves out from mere dependence on his
father, his Bible, or his Church to see and know God in his own right,
he is fulfilling the end of all religion. _For this his father
taught him, for this the Book was written and the Church was
founded._ As George Macdonald put it, "Each generation must do its
own seeking and finding. The father's having found is only the warrant
for the children's search." Said Goethe: "What you have inherited from
your fathers you must earn for yourself before you can call it yours."
This individual experience makes religion real, and the "awkward age"
of the spirit when the old security of credulous belief has gone and
the new assurance of personal conviction has not yet fully come, is a
small price to pay for the sense of reality that enters into religion
when a man for himself knows God. Such is the ideal transition from
credulity to independence, from hearsay to reality.
III
One fallacy which disastrously affects many endeavors after this ideal
transition is the prejudice that, since faith has hitherto in the
youth's experience meant credulous acceptance of another's say-so,
faith always must mean that. Faith and credulity appear to him
identical. In "Alice through the Looking Glass" the Queen asserts that
she is a hundred and one years, five months, and one day old. "I can't
believe that," said Alice. "Can't you?" said the Queen. "Try again,
draw a long breath and shut your eyes." So blind, irrational, and
wilful does faith seem to many! So far from being an essential part
of all real knowledge, therefore, faith seems to stand in direct
contrast with knowledge, and this impression is deepened by our common
phraseology. Tennyson, for example, sings:
"We have but faith: we cannot know;
For knowledge is of things we see."
Before there can be any profitable discussion of religious belief,
therefore, we need to see that faith is one of the chief ways in which
continually we deal with reality; it is a road to truth, without which
some truth never can be reached at all. The reason for its
inevitableness in life is not our lack of knowledge, but rather that
faith is as indispensable as logical demonstration in any real knowing
of the world. Behind all other words to be said about our subject lies
this fundamental matter: _faith is not a substitute for truth, but a
pathway to truth; there are realities which without it never can be
known_.
For one thing, no one can know _persons_ without faith. The world
of people, without whom if a man could live, he would be, as Aristotle
said, either a brute or a god, is closed in its inner meaning to a
faithless mind. Entrance into another life with insight and
understanding is always a venture of trust. We cry vainly like Cassim
before the magic cave, "Open, Barley," if we try to penetrate the
secrets of a human personality without sympathy, loyalty, faith. These
alone cry "Open, Sesame."
Surely this knowledge of persons, impossible without faith, is as
important as any which we possess. While the physical universe
furnishes the general background of our existence, the immediate world
in which we really live is personal, made up of people whom we fear or
love, by whom we are cheered, admonished, hurt, and comforted. "The
world is so waste and empty," cried Goethe, "when we figure but towns
and hills and rivers in it, but to know that someone is living on it
with us, even in silence--this makes our earthly ball a peopled
garden." A solitary Robinson Crusoe would give up any other knowledge,
if in return he could know even a benighted savage like Friday. But
even a savage cannot be known by logical demonstration. Crusoe could
so have learned some things, but when he wanted to know Friday, he
came by way of adventures in confidence, personal trust and
self-commitment, growing reliance and appreciative insight, assured
loyalty and faith. He _knew_ whom he had _believed_.
Moreover, such knowledge of persons is as solid as it is important.
That two plus two make four cannot be gainsaid, and doubtless no other
kinds of information can be quite so absolute as mathematical
theorems. But when one thinks of a comrade, long loved and trusted
until he is known through and through, for practical purposes one can
think of nothing more stable than his knowledge of his friend. The
plain fact is that we _do_ know people, know them well, and that
this knowledge never has been or can be a matter of logical
demonstration. By taking Arthur Hallam to pieces and analyzing him,
the inductive mind might work out all the laws that are involved in
Arthur Hallam's constitution; but that mind with all its knowledge
would not know Arthur Hallam. Tennyson's "In Memoriam," however, makes
clear that knowledge of a friend is not interdicted because scientific
demonstration cannot supply it. Tennyson knew Hallam well, and this
knowledge, far more solid and significant than most other information
he possessed, was not achieved by grinding laws out of facts; it came,
as all such knowledge comes, by faith.
As one considers what this understanding of the personal world, seen
with the open eyes of trust and loyalty, means to us, how assured it
is, how it enriches and deepens life, he perceives that here at least
faith is something far more than a stop-gap for ignorance, a dream, a
fantasy. It is positively a pathway to truth.
There is another realm where faith is our only way of dealing with
reality; by it alone can we know _the possibilities of individuals and
of society_. We are well assured now in the United States that the
nation can be economically prosperous without slavery. But sixty years
ago plenty of people were assured of the contrary, were convinced that
if the abolitionists succeeded we could not economically endure. How
did we come by this significant knowledge that the immoral system was
dispensable? Not by logical demonstration. The economists of most of
our universities logically demonstrated that slavery was essential.
_Faith was the pathway to the truth._ Faith that a new order minus
slavery was possible gained adherents, grew in certainty with access
of new believers, fed its followers on hopes unrealized but
passionately believed in, until _faith became experiment, and
experiment became experience, and experience brought forth
knowledge_. The nation trusted and tried. This is the only way to
truth in the realm of moral possibilities. If the world were finished,
its _i's_ all dotted and its _t's_ all crossed, we might exist on that
sort of descriptive science that finds the facts and plots their laws.
But the world is in the making; what is _actual_ is not quite so
important to us as what is _possible_; we live, as Wordsworth sings,
in
"Hope that can never die,
Effort and expectation and desire,
And something evermore about to be."
To endeavor to satisfy man, therefore, with descriptions of the actual
is preposterous. The innermost meaning of personal and social life
lies in the contrast between what we are and what we may become.
Beyond the achieved present and the demonstrable future, stands the
ideal, whose possibility we can never know as a truth without faith
enough to try.
When, therefore, one hears disparagement of faith as a poor makeshift
for knowledge, he may be pardoned a sharp rejoinder. When has man ever
found solid knowledge in this most important realm of human
possibilities, without faith as the pioneer? We do not know first and
then supply by belief what knowledge lacks. _We believe first, as
Columbus did, and then find new continents because what faith first
suggested a great venture has confirmed._ When Stephenson proposed to
run a steam car forty miles an hour, a host of wise-acres proved the
feat impossible on the ground that no one could move through the air
so rapidly and still survive. If now we know that one easily survives
a speed of over a hundred miles an hour in an aeroplane, it is because
a faith that _saw_ and _dared_ introduced us to the information. We
know now that democracy is not a futile dream, nor the conquest of the
air by wireless and of the land by electricity a madman's frenzy; we
know truths of highest import and certainty from the usefulness of
radium to the wisdom of religious liberty, and all this knowledge
existed as belief in possibility before it became truth in fact. Faith
was "assurance of things hoped for, a conviction of things not seen"
(Hebrews 11:1). Faith is no makeshift. Its power is nowhere felt more
effectively than in the achievement of knowledge.
IV
So far is faith, then, from being blind credulity, that it alone
deserves to be called the Great Discoverer. Everywhere faith goes
before as a pioneer and the more prosaic faculties of the mind come
after to civilize the newly opened territory. In the evolution of the
senses touch developed first. All the knowledge that any creature had,
concerned the tangible. But in time other senses came. Dimly and
uncertainly creatures discerned by hearing and seeing the existence of
distant objects. They became aware of presences which as yet they
could not touch; they were furnished with clues, in following which
they found as real what at first had been intangible. Such a relation
faith bears to knowledge. Faith, said Clement of Alexandria, is the
"ear of the soul." Said Ruskin, faith is "veracity of insight." By it
we hear what as yet we cannot touch and see what the arms of our logic
are not long enough to reach.
All the elemental, primary facts of life are faith's discoveries; we
have no other means of finding them. By faith we discover our
_selves_. We do not hold back from living until we can prove that
we exist. We never can strictly prove that we exist. The very self
that we are trying to demonstrate would have to be used in the
demonstration. We have no other way of getting at ourselves except to
take ourselves for granted--accepting
"This main miracle that you are you,
With power on your own act and on the world."
As Mr. Chesterton remarked, "You cannot call up any wilder vision than
a city in which men ask themselves if they have any selves." By faith
all men go out to live as though their selves were real.
By faith we accept the existence of the _outer world_. We do not
restrain ourselves from acting as though the physical world were
really there, until we can prove it. We never can strictly prove it;
perhaps it is not there at all. When through a microscope an Indian
was shown germs in the Ganges' water, to convince him of the peril of
its use, he broke the instrument with his cane, as though when the
microscope was gone, the facts had vanished too. In his philosophy all
that we see is illusion. Perhaps this is true--the world a phantasm
and our minds fooling us. But none of us believes it. And we do not
believe it because we live by faith--the elemental faith on which all
common sense and science rest and without which man's thought and work
would halt--that our senses and our minds tell us the truth. "It is
idle to talk always of the alternative of reason and faith. _Reason
itself is a matter of faith._ It is an act of faith to assert that
one's thoughts have any relation to reality at all."
By faith we even discover the _universe_. We cannot think of the
world as a multiverse; we always think of it as having unity, and we
do so whether as scientists we talk about the uniformity of nature, or
as Christians we speak of one Creator. Not only, however, can no one
demonstrate that this is a universe; _it positively does not look as
though it were_. Opposing powers snarl at each other and clash in a
disorder that gives to the casual observer not the slightest
intimation that any unity is there. Thunder storms and little babies,
volcanoes and Easter lilies, immeasurable nebulæ in the heavens and
people getting married on the earth--what indescribable contrasts and
confusions! Still we insist on thinking unity into this seeming
anomaly, and out of it we wrest scientific doctrines about the
uniformity of law. As Professor James, of Harvard, put it, "The
principle of uniformity in nature has to be _sought_ under and in
spite of the most rebellious appearances; and our conviction of its
truth is far more like religious faith than like assent to a
demonstration."
One might suppose that beliefs so assumed and so incapable of adequate
demonstration would make the knowledge based upon them insecure. _But
the fact is that all our surest knowledge is thus based on assumptions
that we cannot prove._ "As for the strong conviction," Huxley says,
"that the cosmic order is rational, and the faith that throughout all
duration, unbroken order has reigned in the universe, I not only
accept it, but I am disposed to think it the most important of all
truths." Faith then, in Huxley's thought, is not a makeshift when
knowledge fails. Rather by faith we continually are getting at the
most important realities with which we deal. As Prof. Ladd, of Yale,
impatiently exclaims: "The rankest agnostic is shot through and
through with all the same fundamental intellectual beliefs, all the
same unescapable rational faiths, about the reality of the self and
about the validity of its knowledge. You cannot save science and
destroy all faith. You cannot sit on the limb of the tree while you
tear it up by the roots."
V
If faith is thus the pioneer that leads us to knowledge of persons and
of moral possibilities; if by faith we discover our selves, the outer
world's existence and its unity, why should we be surprised that faith
is our road to God? Superficial deniers of religion not infrequently
seek the discredit of a Christian's trust by saying that God is only a
matter of faith. To which the Christian confidently may answer: Of
course God is a matter of faith. Faith is always the Great Discoverer.
A man finds God as he finds an earthly friend. He does not go apart in
academic solitude to consider the logical rationality of friendship,
until, intellectually convinced, he coolly arms himself with a Q. E.
D. and goes out to hunt a comrade. Friendship is never an adventure of
logic; it is an adventure of life. It is arrived at by what Emerson
called the "untaught sallies of the spirit." We fall in love, it may
be with precipitant emotion; our instincts and our wills are first
engaged; the whole personality rises up in hunger to claim the
affection that it needs and without which life seems unsupportable;
faith, hope, and love engage in a glorious venture, where logic plays
a minor part. But to make friendship rational, to give it poise, to
trace its origins and laws, to clarify, chasten, and direct--this is
the necessary work of thought. Faith discovers and reveals; reason
furnishes criticism, confirmation, and discipline.
So men find God. They are hungry for him not in intellect alone, but
with all their powers. They feel with Tolstoi: "I remembered that I
only _lived_ at those times when I believed in God." They need him to
put sense and worth and hope into life. As with the reality of
persons, the validity of knowledge, the unity of the world, so in
religion the whole man rises up to claim the truth without which life
is barren, meaningless. His best convictions at the first are all of
them insights of the spirit, affirmations of the _man_. But behind,
around and through them all play clarifying thoughts, and reasons come
to discipline and to confirm. But the reasons by themselves could not
have found God. Faith is the Great Discoverer.
"Oh! world, thou choosest not the better part,
It is not wisdom to be only wise,
And on the inward vision close the eyes;
But it is wisdom to believe the heart.
Columbus found a world and had no chart
Save one that Faith deciphered in the skies;
To trust the soul's invincible surmise
Was all his science and his only art.
Our knowledge is a torch of smoky pine
That lights the pathway but one step ahead
Across the void of mystery and dread.
Bid then the tender light of Faith to shine
By which alone the mortal heart is led
Into the thinking of the thought Divine."[1]
[1] Professor Santayana, of Harvard.