it is unearthed; it is summoned to come forward on its own account.
God demands of this secret and innermost vitality that it should no
longer lie incased within the other capacities, but that it should
throw off its sheltering covers, and should emerge into positive
action, and should disclose its peculiar and native character. God,
the Father, calls faith out of its dim background into the front of
the scene. He does this under the pressure of invocations, which
address their appeals through, and by means of, the secular and
visible material, within and behind which He is ever at work. This
had, indeed, always told of His invisible and eternal Godhead: but it
did so indirectly, by requiring Him as its constant pre-supposition
and base. Now, it is so used as to bring God into direct and positive
evidence, by means of acts, which bring forward the energies of His
immediate Fatherhood. All the growth of Eden had always testified to
the existence and the name of God: but a new stage was reached when He
was felt moving, in evening hours, amid the trees of the garden. And
as the Father presses forward out of His silent background, so the
secret sonship in man emerges out of its deep recesses in positive
response, using its own secular faculties by which to carry itself
forward into evidence and action. This definite and direct contact
between the God Who is the hidden source of all life, and the faith
which is the hidden spring of all human activity--this disclosure by
the Father, met by this discovery by the son--this is Religion: and
the history of Religion is the story of its slow and gradual advance
in sanity and clearness, until it culminates in that special
disclosure which we call Revelation; which, again, crowns itself in
that Revelation of the Father through the Son, in which the disclosure
of God to man and the discovery by man of God are made absolute in Him
Who is one with the Father, knowing all that the Father does, making
known all that the Father is.
Now here we have reached a parting of ways. For we have touched the
point at which the distinctions start out between what is secular and
what is sacred--between virtue and godliness--between the world and
the Church. If 'Religion' means this coming forward into the
foreground of that which is the universal background of all existence,
then we cut ourselves free from the perplexity which benumbs us when
we hear of the 'Gospel of the Secular Life;' of the 'Religion of
Humanity;' of doctors and scientific professors being 'Ministers of
Religion;' of the 'Natural Religion' which is contained within the
borders of science with its sense of wonder, or of art with its vision
of beauty. All this is so obviously true in one sense that it sinks to
the level of an amiable commonplace; but if this be the sense
intended, why is all this emphasis laid upon it? Yet if more than this
is meant, we are caught in a juggling maze of words, and are losing
hold on vital distinctions, and feel ourselves to be rapidly
collapsing into the condition of the unhappy Ninevites, who knew not
their right hands from their left.
The word 'Religion,' after all, has a meaning: and we do not get
forward by labouring to disguise from ourselves this awkward fact.
This positive meaning allows everything that can be asked in the way
of sanctity and worth, for nature and the natural life. All of it is
God-given, God-inspired, God-directed; all of it is holy. But the
_fact_ of this being so is one thing: the _recognition_ of it is
another; and it is this recognition of God in things which is the core
and essence of religion. Natural life is the life in God, which has
not yet arrived at this recognition: it is not yet, as such,
religious. The sacred and supernatural office of man is to press
through his own natural environment, to force his spirit through the
thick jungle of his manifold activities and capacities, to shake
himself free from the encompassing complexities, to step out clear and
loose from all entanglement, to find himself, through and beyond all
his secular experiences, face to face with a God, Who, on His side, is
for ever pushing aside the veil which suggests and conceals Him, for
ever disengaging Himself from the phenomena through which He arrives
at man's consciousness, for ever brushing away the confusions, and
coming out more and more into the open, until, through and past the
'thunder comes a human voice;' and His eyes burn their way through
into man's soul; and He calls the man by his name, and takes him
apart, and hides him in some high and separate cleft of the rock, far
from all the glamour and tumult of crowded existence, and holds him
close in the hollow of His hand as He passes by, and names to him,
with clear and memorable voice, the 'Name of the Lord, the Lord God,
merciful, gracious, long-suffering, abundant in goodness and truth,
forgiving iniquity, and Who will by no means clear the guilty.' Here
is Religion. It is the arrival at the secret; the discovery by the son
of a Father, Who is in all His works, yet is distinct from them
all,--to be recognised, known, spoken with, loved, imitated,
worshipped, on His own account, and for Himself alone.
Religion, in this sense, is perfectly distinct from what is secular:
yet, in making this distinction, it brings no reproach: it pronounces
nothing common or unclean. It only asks us not to play with words: and
it reminds us that, in blurring this radical distinction, we are
undoing all the work which it has been the aim of the religious
movement to achieve. For the history of this movement is the record of
the gradual advance man has made in disentangling 'the Name of God'
from all its manifestations. Religion is the effort to arrive at that
Name, in its separable identity, in its personal and distinct
significance. It is the fulfilment of the unceasing cry 'Tell me Thy
name!' In religion we are engaged in the age-long task of lifting the
Name, clear and high, above the clang and roar of its works, that
through and by means of all that He is, we may pierce through to the
very God of gods, and may close with Him in the blessed solitude of a
love which knits heart to heart and spirit to spirit, without any
withholding interval, with no veil to hinder or intervene.
The growth of faith, then, means the gradual increase of this personal
contact, this spiritual intimacy between Father and son. To achieve
this increasing apprehension of the Father's character and love, faith
uses, as instruments and as channels, all its natural faculties, by
which to bring itself forward into action, and through which to
receive the communications, which arrive at it from the heart and will
of Him, Who, on His side, uses all natural opportunities as the
material of a speech, which is ever, as man's ear becomes sensitive
and alert, growing more articulate, and positive, and personal.
The entire human nature,--imagination, reason, feeling,
desire,--becomes to faith a vehicle of intercourse, a mediating aid in
its friendship with God. But faith itself lies deeper than all the
capacities of which it makes use: it is, itself, the primal act of the
elemental self, there at the root of life, where the being is yet
whole and entire, a single personal individuality, unbroken and
undivided. Faith, which is the germinal act of our love for God, is an
act of the whole self, there where it is one, before it has parted off
into what we can roughly describe as separate and distinguishable
faculties. It therefore uses, not one or other of the faculties, but
all; and in a sense it uses them all at once, just as any complete
motion of will, or of love, acts with all the united force of many
combined faculties. A perfect act of love would combine, into a single
movement, the entire sum of faculties, just because it proceeds from
that basal self, which is the substance and unity of them all. So with
faith. Faith, the act of a willing adhesion to God the Father,
proceeds from a source deeper than the point at which faculties
divide.
And this has a most vital bearing on the question of faith's
evidences. It is here we touch on the crucial characteristic which
determines all our logical and argumentative position.
For, if a movement of faith springs from a source anterior to the
distinct division of faculties, then no one faculty can adequately
account for the resultant action. Each faculty, in its separate stage,
can account for _one_ element, for _one_ factor, which contributed to
the result: and that element, that factor, may be of greater or less
importance, according to the rank of the faculty in the entire self.
But, if the movement of faith has also included and involved many
other elements which appear, when analysed out, in the domains of the
other faculties; then the account which each separate faculty can give
of the whole act, can never be more than partial. Its evidence must be
incomplete. If the central self has gathered its momentum from many
channels, it is obvious that the amount contributed by any one channel
will be unable to justify the force exerted, or to explain the event
that followed. If we track home each faculty employed to this central
spring of energy, we shall see that each points to the result,
contributes to it, suggests it; but the result will always be more
than the evidence, so collected, can warrant.
This limitation, which we may allow about other faculties, is apt to
become a stumbling-block when we apply it to the high gift of reason.
Reason, somehow, seems to us to rise into some supreme and independent
throne; it reviews the other faculties; and is, therefore, free from
their limitations. We fear to hint that it has any lord over it. How
can we assume such a lordship without dubbing ourselves irrational
obscurantists, who in folly try to stamp out the light?
But we are not, in reality, dreaming of limiting reason by any
limitations except those which it makes for itself. We are not
violently attempting to make reason stop short at any point, where it
could go on. We are only asking, is there any point at which it stops
of itself, and cannot go further? We propose to use reason right out,
to press it to its utmost limit, to spur it to put forth all its
powers; and we assert that, so doing, reason will, at last, reveal its
inability to get right to the end, to carry clear home. And why?
Because the self is not only rational but something more: it combines,
with its unbroken, central individuality, other elements besides
reason: and therefore, of sheer necessity, whenever that central self
puts out an elemental act in which the integral spring of personal
energy takes part,--such as an act of will, or love, or faith,--then,
reason can be but one factor, but one element, however important, in
that issuing act: and if so, then it can give but a partial account of
it; its own contribution can not wholly explain, or justify the
result. In Bishop Butler's language, the utmost that reason can do is
to make it 'very probable.'
The real root-question in this time-worn controversy is just this: is,
or is not, reason the most primal and elemental act of the integral
personality? If it is, then, of course, it regulates and determines
all subordinate acts. Everything must finally submit to its
arbitration: for everything, if tracked back far enough, must
terminate in an act of reason.
But if, as Christianity asserts, the ultimate and elemental self be a
moral will, that can believe, and love, then, though this self
contains in it reason, it also goes back behind reason. Reason is
indeed one of its essential elements, but it is not its entire
essence, for this includes within itself, that which appears as
feeling, and desire, and imagination, and choice, and passion, as well
as that which shows itself as reason. When, therefore, the self puts
out its primitive power, it will do actions which satisfy reason,
indeed, but which reason cannot exhaustively analyse, or interpret,
since the entire force of reason, if it were all brought into action,
would still be only a partial contribution to the effect.
As a fact, we all of us are perfectly familiar with this limitation,
in affairs of affection and friendship. We never have here that
paralysing awe of reason, which haunts us in matters of religion. We
never allow ourselves to be bullied into submission to its supremacy.
We should laugh at it, if it attempted to dictate to us; or to account
for all our motives. Not that we are at war with it: or are shirking
it: or are afraid of it. We can have affections and friendships, which
have every possible justification which reason can offer. Every
conceivable expediency can unite to authorise and approve them. Every
interest may be served by them. They may stand every test which a cool
common-sense, or a calm impartial judgment, or an acute calculation of
consequences can apply to them. They may be the very embodiment of
reason. And yet, by no amount of calculated expediencies, by no
pressure of rational considerations, could we dream, for one moment,
that our friendship was accounted for. If ever it could trace its
origin to these motives, it would cease to be what we thought it. The
discovery would destroy it. All possible considerations and
calculations might have been present, and yet they would be utterly
powerless to create in us the love. And the love, however gladly it
may recognise the approving considerations, would repudiate, with
amazement, and with laughter, any presumption on their part to say,
'this is why you love.'
It is the same with all primal acts of heroism. They may be absolutely
rational: yet, they would cease to be heroic, they would never be
done, if they did not call upon a force, which, indeed, may determine
its direction by reason, but which uses quite other motives to induce
itself to act. Utilitarianism, which attempts to account for such
heroic momentum by purely rational considerations, finds itself
reduced to shifts which all those can see through, who refuse to be
juggled out of their own experiences. It is the same with all the
higher forms of moral energy. All of them go beyond their evidences.
They all lift the rational motives, which suggest and determine the
direction of their activity, by an impulsive force, which has in it
the power of initiative, of origination. Every high act of will is a
new creation. As the gunpowder sleeps, until the spark alights upon
it, so the directions of reason remain below the level of action,
until the jet of a living will fuses its fire with their material. The
act which results may, indeed, be capable of complete interpretation
on reasonable grounds: it may be able to show reasons which account
for every fragment of it: yet, still, the living force which drew
together, and combined all those separate reasons into a single
resultant act, has a creative and original character. The series of
reasons, however complete, cannot account for the result, for they
cannot possibly account for their own combination: and without this
combination of their momentum the result would not be there.
It is well to recall briefly this character of the moral will, the
affections, the love, of man. For these are faith's nearest and
dearest allies. It is here, in these elemental motions, that faith
finds its closest parallel. It is something very like an act of will,
a movement of love, an heroic and chivalrous moral venture. And
whenever we desire to understand its relations to reason, we must
persistently recall the attitude towards reason taken by these
fundamental forms of energy; only remembering that faith is yet more
elemental, yet more completely the act of the central integral self,
even than these. Where they leave reason behind, it will do so yet
further. Where they call upon something deeper, and more primitive
than reason, it will do the same, and yet more triumphantly. It is not
that either it or they are without reason: or that they stand outside
reason, consulting it so far as they choose, and then dropping it; it
is not that reason may not be found in every corner and fragment of
their activity, pervading, colouring, restraining, limiting,
directing, justifying it: but simply that what we call the rational
self is not only rational, but also something more: that, if analysed
out, the reason will not appear as the root and core of the man, but
rather as an element inhering in a yet more central base: and that
whenever the energy of vital action is put out, we are driven to look
through and beyond reason, if we would unearth the source whence the
act springs.
The relation, then, of reason to faith is not strange, or forced, or
unfamiliar to us, if it is much the same as its relation to the
affections, or to moral acts and intuitions. We know what to expect,
what part it ought to play in such a case. As in a case of heroic
moral daring, or high affection, so, in a matter of faith, we shall
expect that reason, with its arguments and its evidences, will play
all round and about it, will go before it, discussing the path to
follow, will follow after it, unravelling the secret forces at work in
it: will watch, and analyse, and learn, and warn; will reconnoitre,
and examine, and survey, and discover: will justify, interpret,
defend, assist. But yet we shall expect, also, that the act of faith
will do more than all the arguments can anticipate: that it will hold
itself free from them all: that it will appeal, not to them, but to
its own inherent force, for the final decision: that it will move by
instinct, by spontaneity, by inspiration: that it will rush past all
evidences, in some great stride; that it will brush through scruples
that cannot be gainsaid, and obstacles that cannot be got over; that
it will surprise, that it will outdo, that it will create; that it
will bring novel forces into play, invisible, unaccountable,
incalculable; that it will fly, when reason walks; that it will laugh,
when reason trembles: that it will over-leap barriers which reason
deems final. As with love, so with faith, it will take in all
evidences, it will listen to all proofs; but when they have done their
utmost, it has yet got to begin; it itself, after all its
calculations, must make the actual spring, which is the decision. Out
of itself, it draws its strength: out of itself it makes its effort;
by being what it is, it sees what it sees, it does what it does. It
uses the evidence; but uses it to leap from, to go further. Its
motives, advances, efforts, issue from within itself. Just as the
lover's final answer to the question, 'why did you do that?' must be,
'because I loved'; so the final answer of the believer, in explanation
of an act, can never be wrung out of the reasonable grounds for so
acting; it must always be 'because I believed.' Just as man first
acts, and speaks, and reason, following behind, can at last discover
that his actions were all consecutive, and that his language has a
perfect grammar; so faith has always to make its venture, prompted and
inspired from within, and only long afterwards can it expect to learn
that if it has been true to itself, to its proper promptings, then its
action can, by slow and plodding reason, be thoroughly interpreted and
justified. Faith is, above all things, anticipatory. The sonship,
within, anticipates what the Father has in store for it: by means of
affection, by rapid instincts of love, it assumes what it cannot yet
verify, it foretells the secrets that lie hidden within the Father's
eyes. So anticipating, it makes its venture;--a venture which love
alone can understand and justify, though the faithfulness of the
eternal and supreme Father ensures that the anticipation shall receive
its full verification.
If this be the relation of faith to reason, we see the explanation of
what seems, at first sight, to the philosopher, to be the most
irritating and hypocritical characteristic of faith. It is always
shifting its intellectual defences. It adopts this or that fashion of
philosophical apology; and then, when this is shattered by some novel
scientific generalisation, faith, probably after a passionate struggle
to retain the old position, suddenly and gaily abandons it, and takes
up with the new formula, just as if nothing had happened: it discovers
that the new formula is admirably adapted for its purposes, and is, in
fact, just what it always meant, only it has unfortunately omitted to
mention it. So it goes on, again and again; and no wonder that the
philosophers growl at those humbugs, the clergy!
But they are criticising faith as if it were a theory, as if knowledge
were its province, while, in truth, the seat of faith lies back behind
the region of knowledge. Its radical acts and motives are independent
of any particular condition of thought or science: they are deeper
recessed; they exist in their own right, and under their own
conditions. True, they may not be able to express themselves, to get
their energies forward, to set themselves free, to manifest
themselves, except through the mediation of knowledge,--through the
instruments and channels which the science of the day provides them.
But this does not confuse their inherent and distinct character. They
never identify themselves with the tools they use. They sit quite
loose to the particular state of thought, the formula, the terms,
through which they make their way out into action. And, moreover,
since the acts of faith are more radical than those of reason, and
since they belong to the entire man acting in his integrity, they
therefore of necessity anticipate, in their degree, all that the man,
by slow development, by the patient industry of reasoning, will
laboriously disclose. Lying deeper than all knowledge, they hold in
them the condition under which all knowledge will be arrived at. They
constitute the activity which ought to be at the background of all our
reasoning. No particular or partial state of knowledge can exhaust
their significance. Each step knowledge makes does but illustrate, in
some new fashion, the relation of all knowledge to faith--does but
elucidate the characteristics of that primal sonship. In each fresh
discovery or generalisation, faith finds a new instrument for
expressing its old convictions; it is taught to see the weak points,
the imperfections of its former expressions; it understands where they
hold good, and where they failed; it gets out more of itself than ever
before, through the new channels opened to it; it discovers more of
its own character by finding better modes in which to manifest it. It
does but half know itself, so long as its expression is encumbered.
The advance of secular knowledge, then, is for faith, an acquired
gain: for by it, it knows itself better; it sees more of what was
involved in its vital convictions. It has a struggle, no doubt, in
dropping off the expressions that have grown familiar to it, and in
detecting the fresh insight into its own nature which it can win by
the new terminology: but when once it has mastered the terms, new
lights break out upon it, new suggestions flash, new capacities
disclose themselves. It has won a new tool: when it has become
familiarised with the use of it, it can do great and unexpected things
with it.
But, for all that, it is but a new tool, worked by the old
convictions; they have not changed, any more than love changes, though
the slow development of married life may carry the lovers into unknown
experiences, in foreign lands, under changed skies. The two, if they
be faithful, learn far more of what the love they plighted means, as
each sweeping revolution carries them hither and thither, than ever
they understood on the wedding day; yet it is ever the old love then
pledged, which they hold fast to the end. Its identity is emphasised
by the changes. So with faith. It may absorb its energies in the joy
of wielding the particular instrument with which, at any one moment,
science supplies it. But it will never the least fear to drop it, so
soon as the advancing skill and the pushing minds of men have
elaborated for it some yet more delicate and subtle tool, wherewith to
give free play to its native vitalities.