fact. And its entire office and use lies in realising the secret fact.
For the bond is spiritual; and it can only realise itself in a spirit
that has become aware of its own laws. No blind animal acceptance of
the divine assistance can draw out the powers of this sonship. The
reception of the assistance must itself be conscious, loving,
intelligent, willing. The natural world can receive its full
capacities from God without recognition of the source whence they flow
in: but this absence of living recognition forbids it ever to surpass
those fixed limits of development which we name 'natural.' But a
creature of God that could not only receive but recognise that it
received, would, by that very recognition, lay itself open to an
entirely novel development; it would be susceptible of infinitely
higher influences shed down upon it from God; it would admit far finer
and richer inpourings of divine succours; it would be fed, not only
from underground channels as it were, but by fresh inlets which its
consciousness of its adherence in God would uncover and set in motion.
The action of God upon His creatures would be raised to a new level of
possibility: for a living and intelligent will has capacities of
receptivity, which were altogether excluded so long as God merely
gave, and the creature blindly and dumbly took. Faith, then, opens an
entirely new career for creaturely existence; and the novelty of this
career is expressed in the word 'supernatural.' The 'supernatural'
world opens upon us as soon as faith is in being[55].
And this career, it will be seen, is markedly distinct from the
natural in this--that it is capable of ever advancing expansion. All
natural things, which blindly accept their life from God, must,
perforce, have a decreed and certified development, limited by the
conditions in which they are found existing. Their receptivity is a
fixed quantity, determined by the character imposed upon them at
creation, and bound to come to an abrupt arrest at some precise
point[56]. But receptivity through conscious recognition is open to a
development of which it is impossible for us to fix the limits. For
this living recognition itself advances in its capacity to see and
understand. Every act by which it recognises the Giver in the gifts,
heightens and intensifies its power to recognise Him; and every
increase of its power to recognise Him increases also its capacity to
receive; and this increase will again react on the faculties of
recognition. A vision opens out of spiritual growth, in which every
step forward made through incoming grace, makes a new step possible,
finds a fresh grace ever waiting to crown its latest gift with ever
new endowment. The sonship that is at work underground in man, below
the level of consciousness, at the hidden base of faith, is one that
holds in it capacities which can only be evoked under the appeals of a
living and voluntary faith. Faith is the discovery of an inherent
sonship, which, though already sealed to it, already in action,
nevertheless cannot but withhold its more rich and splendid energies
until this discovery is made; and which discloses them only according
to the progressive clearness and force with which the process of
discovery advances. The history of faith is the history of this
gradual disclosure, this growing capacity to recognise and receive,
until the rudimentary omen of God's fatherhood in the rudest savage
who draws, by clumsy fetich, or weird incantation, upon a power
outside himself, closes its long story in the absolute recognition,
the perfect and entire receptivity, of that Son of man, who can do
nothing of Himself, 'but what He seeth the Father do,' and, for that
very reason, can do everything: for whatsoever 'the Father doeth, the
Son doeth also.'
Faith, then, is not only the recognition by man of the secret source
of his being, but it is itself, also, the condition under which the
powers, that issue from that source, make their arrival within him.
The sonship, already germinal, completes itself, realises itself in
man, through his faith. Not only is the unconscious human nature held
by attachment to the Father who feeds it with hidden succours, but
faith is, itself, the power by which the conscious life attaches
itself to God; it is an apprehensive motion of the living spirit, by
which it intensifies its touch on God; it is an instinct of surrender,
by which it gives itself to the fuller handling of God: it is an
affection of the will, by which it presses up against God, and drinks
in divine vitality with quickened receptivity[57].
What then will be its characteristics? We have only to keep close to
the conception of sonship, and we shall understand them well enough.
Faith is the attitude, the temper, of a son towards a father. That is
a relationship that we all can understand for ourselves. We know it,
in spite of all the base and cruel corruptions under which, in the
homes of man, its beauty lies disfigured. Still, beneath disguises, we
catch sight, in rare and happy conditions, of that beautiful intimacy
which can spring up between a son and a father, where love is one with
reverence, and duty fulfils itself in joy. Such a sonship is like a
spiritual instinct, which renders intelligible to the son every mood
and gesture of the father. His very blood moves in rhythm to the
father's motives. His soul hangs, for guidance, on the father's eyes:
to him, each motive of the father justifies itself as a satisfying
inspiration. The father's will is felt deliciously encompassing him
about; enclosed within it, his own will works, glad and free in its
fortifying obedience. Such a relationship as this needs no justifying
sanction beyond itself: it is its own sanction, its own authority, its
own justification. 'He is my father': that is a sufficient reason for
all this sympathetic response to another's desire. 'I am his son':
that is the final premiss in which all argument comes to a close. The
willing surrender of the heart is the witness to a _fact_ which is
beyond argument, which accepts no denial, yet which is no tyrannous
fate, but is a living and animating bond of blood, which it is a joy
to recognise, and an inspiration to confess.
It is in such a spirit of sonship that faith reveals and realises
itself. Faith is that temper of sympathetic and immediate response to
Another's will which belongs to a recognised relationship of vital
communion. It is the spirit of confident surrender, which can only be
justified by an inner identification of life. Its primary note,
therefore, will be _trust_--that trust of Another, which needs no
ulterior grounds on which to base itself, beyond what is involved in
the inherent law of this life. Faith will ever discover, when its
reason for action, or belief, are traced to their last source, that it
arrives at a point where its only and all-sufficient plea will be 'God
is my Father: I am His child.' That relationship is its root; on the
top of that relationship faith works; as a witness to that
relationship, it puts forth all the spiritual temper which, of
necessity, follows on this intimacy of contact.
And, here, we find ourselves in the presence of the law by which faith
claims to be _universal_. Unless this inner relationship be a fact,
faith could not account for itself: but if it be a fact, it must
constitute a fixed and necessary demand upon all men. All are,
equally, 'children of God': and the answer to the question 'Why should
I believe?' must be, for ever and for all, valid; 'because you are a
child of God.' Faith is nothing but the spiritual temper and attitude,
which belong, inherently, to such a fact. No one can escape from such
a claim: for his existence constitutes the claim. If he be a child, it
must be demanded, of him, that he should display the characteristics
of his childhood: the father must, of necessity, be concerned with the
question of his own recognition by his son. Our manhood lies in this
essential sonship: and, if so, then to be without faith, without the
conscious realisation of the sonship, is to be without the fulness of
a man's proper nature. It is to be inhuman: to be curtailed of the
natural development: to be maimed and thwarted. It means that the
vital outcome of the inner verity has been arrested; that the
sensitive perceptions have been blunted and stunted; that the sonship
in us has, somehow, lost touch with its true fatherhood.
We learn at once, as we consider this, the interpretation of that
two-sided character, which surprises us in God's dealings with
men:--i.e. the imperative rigour of His stated requirements, coupled
with His wide and patient tolerance, in actual fact.
As a Father of all, He cannot, conceivably, be satisfied with anything
short of complete recognition by His children. He must look for faith;
He must require it of them all: He must leave no means untried by
which to secure it: He must seek to win it at all costs: His love is
inevitably and cruelly hindered, unless He can obtain it: and when He
obtains it, He must passionately desire to establish, evoke, develope,
perfect it: for each rise in faith is a rise in capacities of
intercourse, of intimacy, between Father and son. We see how strenuous
and zealous will be His efforts to build up faith in men: we
understand how urgent, and pressing, and alarming will become His
entreaties, His warnings, His menaces, His appeals, if faith is
allowed to slide or fail. Loss of faith means a shattered home, a
ruptured intimacy, a sundered love; it means that a Father must look
on while the very nature He has made in His image shrivels and
shrinks, and all hope of growth, of advancing familiarity, of
increasing joy, of assured sympathy, is cut down and blighted. We all
know the bitterness of a breach which scatters a family into
fragments: and that is but a faint shadow of all which the great
Father sees to be involved in the broken contact between Himself and
His son. What standard have we by which to sound the abyss of divine
disappointment, as God waits ready with gift upon gift of endless
grace which He will pour out upon the child of His love, as the
endless years open out new wonders of advancing intimacy; and lo! the
channel by which alone the gifts can reach him, is choked and closed?
Faith is the son's receptivity: it is that temper of trust, which
makes the entry of succours possible: it is the medium of response: it
is the attitude of adherence to the Father, by virtue of which
communications can pass. If faith goes, all further action of God upon
the soul, all fresh arrival of power, is made impossible. The channel
of intercourse is blocked.
The demand, then, for faith by God is bound to be exacting, and
urgent, and universal. But, then, this demand holds in reserve a
ground of hope, of patience, of tolerance, of charity, which we can,
in no single instance, venture to limit. For the faith, which it
rigorously asks for, reposes, as we see, on an inner and essential
relationship, already existent, which knits man to his God. Not even
the Fall, with all its consequent accumulations of sin, can avail to
wholly undo this primitive condition of existence. The fatherhood of
God still sustains its erring children; the divine image is blurred,
but not blotted out. Still, at the close of the long days, our Lord
can speak to the wondering men who flock about Him, of One Who is even
now their Father in Heaven. This objective and imperishable
relationship, the underlying ground of all our being, is the
pre-supposition of all faith, without which it would itself be
impossible. And, this being so, God can afford to wait very long for
faith to show itself. So long as its primary condition is there, there
is always hope. The stringent demand is not inspired by the mind of a
lawgiver, nor pressed home with the austerity of a judge; it expresses
the hunger of a father's heart, to win the confidence and to evoke the
capacities of the children of its love. Such a hunger is, indeed, more
rigorous and exact than the letter of any law: it aspires after a more
accurate correspondence; it is sensitive to more delicate
distinctions: but, nevertheless, it holds, in its fatherliness, far
wider capacities of toleration than lawgiver, or judge. That same
heart of the father, which in its hunger of love is so exacting, will,
out of the same hunger, never despair, and never forsake: it will
never cease from the pursuit of that responsive trust which it
desires; it will make allowances, it will permit delays, it will weave
excuses, it will endure rebuffs, it will condescend to persuasion, it
will forget all provocations, it will wait, it will plead, it will
repeat its pleas, it will take no refusal, it will overleap all
obstacles, it will run risks, it will endlessly and untiringly
forgive, if only, at the last, the stubborn child-heart yield, and the
tender response of faith be won.
Here, then, we seem to see why the nature of faith allows for two
points which surprise us in God's dealings, as if with a
contradiction. On the one hand, we hear Him, though prophet and
priest, insisting, with severe precision, on the necessity of a right
and accurate faith. On the other, we cannot but recognise, in the open
area of actual life, the evidences of a wide and almost boundless
toleration. Again and again it must have seemed to us that the Church
and the world gave, thus, antithetical evidence of God's character.
Yet, in truth, both speak the voice of one and the same God, Who, in
His undivided love, both passionately seeks for the delicate and
direct response of an accurate faith; and, also, in order not to lose
this final joy, 'suffereth long, and is kind, beareth all things,
believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things.'
Yes!--has even to endure that men should pit His toleration against
His love, and should argue that, because He will wait so long and
quietly for the fruit that He desires to reap, therefore, He does not
desire the fruit. In reality, the degree of the toleration, with which
God will patiently wait for the fruits of faith, is the measure of the
extremity of His desire for it. Just because He wants it so much, He
waits so long.
III. If faith, then, be the witness and the exercise of our sonship in
God, we can recognise at once the place it will hold among the other
powers and capacities of our nature. We are so unfortunately apt to
rank it as one among many faculties, and then to find ourselves
engaged in agitating controversies concerning its limits and its
claims. We have to secure for it, against the rest, a field for free
dominion; and that field is hard to define; and rival powers beset it;
and there are raids and skirmishes on every frontier; and reason is
ever making violent incursions on the one side, and feeling is
actively besieging it on the other: and the scientific frontiers,
which we are ever on the point of fixing, shift, and change, and
vanish, as soon as we determine them; and the whole force of Christian
apologetics is spent in aimless and barren border-warfare.
But, if what we have been saying be true, the whole trouble turns on a
mistake. Faith is not to be ranked by the side of the other faculties
in a federation of rival powers, but is behind them all. It goes back
to a deeper root; it springs from a more primitive and radical act of
the central self than they. It belongs to that original spot of our
being, where it adheres in God, and draws on divine resources. Out
from that spot our powers divide, radiating into separate
gifts,--will, memory, feeling, reason, imagination, affection; but all
of them are but varying expressions of that essential sonship, which
is their base. And all, therefore, run back into that home where faith
abides, and works, and rises, and expands. At the root of all our
capacities lies our sonship; at the root of all our conscious life
lies faith, the witness of our sonship. By adherence in God, we put
out our gifts, we exercise our functions, we develop our faculties;
and faith, therefore, far from being their rival, whom they are
interested in suspecting, and curbing, and confining within its
limits, is the secret spring of their force, and the inspiration of
their growth, and the assurance of their success. All our knowledge,
for instance, relies upon our sonship; it starts with an act of
faith[58]. We throw ourselves, with the confidence of children, upon
an external world, which offers itself to our vision, to our touch, to
our review, to our calculation, to our handling, to our use. Who can
assure us of its reality, of its truth? We must measure it by those
faculties under the manipulation of which it falls: but how can the
faculties guarantee to us their own accuracy? How can we justify an
extension of our own inner necessities to the world of outward things?
How can we attribute to nature that rational and causative existence
which we find ourselves forced to assume in it? Our justification, our
confidence, all issue, in the last resort, from our sonship. Our
powers have, in them, some likeness to those of God. If He be our
Father, if we be made in His image, then, in our measure, we can rely
upon it that we close with Nature in its reality; that our touch, our
sight, our reason, have some hold on the actual life of things; that
we see and know in some such manner, after our degree, as God Himself
sees and knows. In unhesitating reliance upon our true sonship, we
sally out and deal with the world; we act upon the sure conviction
that we are not altogether outside the secret of objective existence.
We refuse absolutely to doubt, or go behind the reports made to us by
feeling, by memory, by thought. If once we are clear as to what the
report is, we rest on it; we ask for no power to stand (as it were)
outside our own experience, our own knowledge, so as to assure
ourselves of their veracity. We are certain that our Father cannot
have misguided us; that we are within His influence; that we are in
modified possession of His truth; that our capacities reflect His
mind. We could not have so confidently recognised, understood, and
handled the world, if it had been wholly foreign to us. As it is, we
lay instinctive hold upon it; we take spontaneous possession; we exert
authority upon it; we feel our inherent right over it; we are at home
in it; we move freely about it, as children in a father's house.
Acting in this faith, all our capacities justify themselves to us;
they respond to our reliance upon them; they develop into ever
advancing strength under the motions of this trust; they form a
continual and increasing witness to the verity of that sonship in
which we have believed.
Faith, then, belongs to our entire body of activities. We live by
faith. By faith, under the inspiration of faith, we put out our life,
we set to work, we exercise faculties, we close with our
opportunities, we have confidence in our environment, we respond to
calls, we handle critical emergencies, we send out far abroad our
experimental intelligence, we discover, we accumulate experiences, we
build, and plant, and develop. An elemental act of faith lies at the
root of all this advance; and every motion that we make, demands a
renewal of that primitive venture. In all secular progress 'we walk by
faith.' Every step revives the demand. Just as the earth, if it
necessitates the idea of a primal creation, requires, by exactly the
same necessity, an incessant renewal of that first creative act, so
our life, if it required faith to start it, requires faith every
moment to sustain it. Our faculties never arrive at a use which is
self-dependent and self-originated, as if they could grow beyond the
tentative conditions of their earliest assays. They originate in a
venturous experiment; and, however long, and however complicated that
experiment become, it retains its original character; it remains
experimental to the end. The _results_, no doubt, justify the venture
made; but, then, the first venture involved such immense assumptions,
that no results reached can ever complete its justification, and so
remove its tentative nature. For, by assuming a real correspondence
between our faculties and the world with which they deal, it assumed
that such a correspondence would never fail us; would be capable of
infinite verification; would prove adequate to all possible
experiences; would receive indefinite and progressive extension. No
verifications ever reached can, then, exhaust the faith of that
primitive venture; they can only serve to exhibit to it how far more
was contained within that venture than it could ever have conceived.
New knowledge, new experience, far from expunging the elements of
faith, make ever fresh demands upon it; they constitute perpetual
appeals to it to enlarge its trust, to expand its original audacity.
And yet the very vastness of those demands serves to obscure and
conceal their true character. This is the key to much of our present
bewilderment. The worlds of knowledge and of action have assumed such
huge proportions, have accumulated such immense and complicated
resources, have gained such supreme confidence in their own stability,
have pushed forward their successes with such startling power and
rapidity, that we have lost count of their primal assumption. In
amazement at their stupendous range, we are over-awed; we dare not
challenge them with their hypothetical origin, or remind them that
their entire and wonderful structure is but an empty and hollow dream,
unless they are prepared to place their uttermost trust in an
unverified act of faith. Given that trust, which relies on the reality
of the bond which holds between our inner faculties and the outer
world, then all this marvellous vision is rooted on a rock, has
validity and substance. Withdraw that spiritual trust in our sonship,
and all this fairy-world, won for us by science and experience,
These cloud-capped towers, these gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like an unsubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind.
Our secular and scientific life is an immense experiment in faith,--an
experiment which verifies itself by success, but which justifies
itself only if it remembers to attribute all its success to the
reality of that hidden relationship to God, which is the key to all
its capacities, the justification of all its confidence, and the
security of all its advance.
Such a remembrance is not easy for it: for the exercise of the
capacities is instinctive and spontaneous, and it requires an effort
of reflection to question the validity of such exercise. And such an
effort seems tiresome and impertinent in the heat of successful
progress, in the thick of crowding conquests. The practical man is apt
to give an irritated stamp on the ground, which to him feels so solid,
and to deem this a sufficient answer to the importunate inquiry how he
knows that he has any substantial world to know and to handle. For
faith lies _behind_ our secular life, secreted within it: and the
secular life, therefore, can go on as if no faith was wanted; it need
not trouble its head with perplexing questions, whether its base be
verifiable by the same standards and measures as its superstructure.
Its own practical activity is complete and free, whether it discover
its hidden principle or not: just as Mr. Jourdain's conversation was
complete and free, long before he discovered that he was talking
prose. We have to stand outside our secular life and reflect on it, to
disclose its true spring. The appeal to faith here is indirect.