1. Society is founded on faith. This becomes clearer as civilization becomes more complex, and the mutual interactions of men more intricate, more potent in their influence. Men depend on one another for kinds of conduct which cannot be regulated by law or controlled by courts of justice. Standards of honour are erected by common consent which become powerful over the selfishness and greed and meanness of individual members of society. These often exercise a sway far beyond that of formal legislation. But it is evident that their fulfilment is secured by faith. In all business affairs men have, to lean on one another for promptitude and honesty. In the deeper relations of family and friendship faith is the very soul of reality. Thus we can have no true love, no frank intercourse, no purity of motive, and no sincere sacrifice except as we are bound together by this golden chain of personal trust. The very fact that we realize this more openly and intelligently than was possible in past ages is proof that the social order is becoming more truly ethical, that its most sacred and solid boons are known and confessed to be the fruit of that free movement of conscience and heart which is the very atmosphere of the great principle of faith.
Professor Giddings remarks that good faith is an essential of co-operation, and in fact the whole social structure is built upon the assumption that men will conform. Organized life in society would be impossible if the great majority of men did not conform. An examination of almost any incident of one’s daily routine will reveal how completely and unreservedly we count on the reliability of others—of men in general. We are constantly placing our welfare, our health, our very lives in the power of other individuals whom we may not know, may not see, may not even ever have heard of. One goes into a restaurant and orders a meal. The viands may not be wholly to his taste, but at least he expects them to be clean and wholesome, and it never enters his head that the cook may be an expert poisoner, working with diabolical ingenuity to see how many lives he may undermine in the course of his career. One buys a ticket for a railroad journey. Unless there has happened to be a succession of recent accidents, he has no thought of special danger. At any rate, he unconsciously takes it for granted that every individual connected with the running of that railroad, from the superintendent and train-dispatcher to the switchman and section hand, is devoting himself single-heartedly to seeing that that train reaches its destination safely. One goes into a haberdashery and buys a hat. He asks to have it charged and delivered. When the bill comes, he pays it with a cheque. In this simple, everyday transaction, there is a complicated chain of confidences, expectations, and dependences. If there were failure anywhere along the line, the fundamentals of business life would be weakened. [Note: H. P. Fairchild, Outline of Applied Sociology, 20.]
2. This faith is, of course, modified, and often painfully modified, by our experience of men’s frailties and imperfections; as we grow older we have to make more and more allowance for these drawbacks; unquestioning and unlimited confidence is the privilege of childhood, which soon passes away when the fresh morning of life gives place to the burden and heat of the day.
But yet, with all this allowance, we have still to accept it as the social basis of our existence; if it is lost, or even overshadowed by a cynical scepticism, life is hardly worth living; for, isolation is impotence, and want of sympathy leads to want of insight. In fact credit, although not unlimited credit, is the condition of all the undertakings—as of commercial, so also of social, political, and religious life. Humanity must grow as a whole, and mutual faith is the one bond of unity.
What we ought to feel is that it needs specific evidence of untrustworthiness to justify suspicion, rather than that it needs specific evidence of trustworthiness to justify belief. We do not, even in ordinary cases of well-grounded confidence, believe because we have calculated the probabilities, and find a great balance in favour of the testimony we are weighing, but we accept that testimony at once, so long as there are no strong warnings of its positive untrustworthiness. It is, in any wholesome state of society, unbelief on all matters involving personal testimony for which we need explicit evidence rather than belief. The instincts and affections are the true basis of trust. On all matters of personal confidence, recourse is had to an intellectual estimate of probabilities, only when there is some warning of experience given us to distrust those instincts and affections—i.e. that they are in danger of being abused. The initiative lies properly with those who would sap confidence; and unless that initiative be taken, trust once established, whether by a long experience of trustworthiness or by the far more rapid process of personal affinities and insights, remains legitimately in possession of the field.
How do we gain the sustaining, invigorating thoughts of patriotism, of friendship, of love? How scantly the appearance in itself justifies the devotion which we feel for country, for friend, for father or wife or child. We see a little, and the soul uses in faith what it sees as the vantage ground for its own generous activity. It turns itself from nothing and, it interprets, it transforms, all things. It dares to regard the strifes and the selfishnesses of classes and parties, and to look through them to that common enthusiasm which lies still and deep, drawn from long ages and ready for service in time of need. It dares to take account of the weaknesses and imperfections and faults of those by whose fellowship it is strong. It dares to acknowledge the misunderstandings, the coldnesses, the failures of sympathy, the frailties of self-will, which cloud the sunshine of the family. It dares, in a word, to rest on faith and not on sight: to realize not by any creative energy but by a true power of divination that to which the appearance most imperfectly witnesses. [Note: B. F. Westcott, The Incarnation and Common Life, 367.]
3. A corrupt society is, above all things, marked by. two characteristics—a universal habit of questioning all that is said, and an equally universal habit of saying what is not true. On the contrary, in a healthy society like that of England, habits of trust and of truth equally support each other; and it has now become, for instance, a principle of education that the best way to evoke truthfulness in boys is uniformly to believe them, even when appearances are against them.
Over and above the properties of which we have knowledge there are qualities in every man concerning which
We have but faith; we cannot know;
For knowledge is of things we see.
It is only that element in personality which appears to act spontaneously in which we can have faith, that element in whose actions we descry an inner unity upon diverse occasions where outward unity is impossible. In the story of Gethsemane, when Jesus says to the sleeping three, “The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak,” He evinces faith in hidden elements of character, hidden in the past under selfish rivalries and claims for reward, and now under the desertion and denial He had Himself prophesied as at hand. Yet by action based on such estimate of His followers, He, humanly speaking, conquered the civilized world. [Note: L. Douglas, Christus Futurus, 34.]
Bishop Blomfield, a great classic, took it into his head to teach mathematics, which bored his pupils not a little. They were struggling through a proposition in Euclid, when one of the Sheridans, who was amongst them, said to his tutor, “Pray, sir, may I ask whether Euclid was a good man?” “What do you mean?” said the other. “I mean,” replied Sheridan, “was he a good, honourable, truthful person?” “Oh yes!” said Blomfield; “I never heard anything to the contrary.” “Then, sir,” rejoined the other, “don’t you think we might take his word for this proposition?” [Note: M. E. Grant Duff, Notes from a Diary, ii. 55.]
4. But, over and above this belief in humanity at large, and . far more important in the education of mind and character, is the faith which we place in human personalities greater and higher than our own. For mankind has its natural leaders, whom the mass of men are rightly inclined to follow, with a loyalty generally strong, and sometimes even pathetic in its intensity. Those leaders it recognizes sometimes as invested with an authority of station and position; ‘sometimes as endowed with exceptional gifts of ability, knowledge, learning, and character, giving them a natural ascendancy over their fellow-men; sometimes as having, or appearing to have, a mission and inspiration from above. It is by trust in such leaders that the forward steps in human progress are actually made by mankind as a whole. It is even startling to think how much of our actual knowledge, and of the rules which guide our conduct day by day, is due, not to our own discovery or origination, but to what we have made our own by trust in those whom we believe to be greater, wiser, better, than ourselves.
No soul is desolate as long as there is a human being for whom it can feel trust and reverence. Romola’s trust in Savonarola was something like a rope suspended securely by her path, making her step elastic while she grasped it; if it were suddenly removed, no firmness of the ground she trod could save her from staggering, or perhaps from falling? [Note: George Eliot, Romola.]
A story is told of two English soldiers in the South African War of 1899-1902. They were toiling through the night, over the trackless veld, on one of Lord Roberts’s great strategic marches. “What is the use of it?” said one of the two, wellnigh worn out, stumbling on in the twilight over the rough and endless plain. “Never mind,” said the other; “come along; Roberts knows.” This was precisely Faith. Its foothold was firmly set on the man’s experience of his chief’s capacity and power. From that foothold it reached boldly out into the unknown, and trusted the chief’s hidden plan without a murmur. [Note: H. C. G. Moule, Faith, 14.]
