I. It gives reality to our hopes.—Hopesees in its dreams the ladder reaching into heaven. Faith resolutely plants its feet upon the rungs, and takes the risk of their vanishing. Hope sees the horses and chariots of fire round about its Dothan. Faith, strong in these insubstantial defenders, faces the horses and chariots of the King of Syria. Hope believes that this life is not all. Faith takes the risk that Hope is dreaming, and resolves to act upon the assumption that “earth is but a pupil’s place.” Faith is, and must be, in the first instance, a leap in the dark. It is “the resolute choice to stand or fall by the noblest hypothesis.” “To stand or fall”—faith’s act always contains this alternative, “to stand or fall.” You must say to Christ, “If I perish, I perish on Thy shoulder; if I sink, I sink in Thy vessel; if I die, I die at Thy door”; and you need not think that you are not ready to come to Christ because of your “ifs.” Faith is—taking the risk, venturing all on your hopes, going forward in confident assurance that your hopes of the Unseen are true.
At the end of the Kingswood dining-hall there used to be a narrow ledge, nearly five feet from the ground. I have sometimes put a little friend of ours there and asked her to jump down. Then I have watched her, and seen how hope and fear did battle within her eyes—hope of the wild rush through the air and the love that waited at the end, and fear of the yawning gulf below, fear that found words in “Daddy, I shall fall.” Then Faith took its great resolve to act as if Hope were truth, there was a sudden avalanche of golden hair, and the little one was safe in her father’s arms. There are those here that are even as that child. They stand irresolute before the grand adventure of Faith. They would like to take the leap if they were certain that they would reach the Father’s arms; but—but—are there not those who say that the Father is dead, or, at least, that He careth not? They are tired and would fain be at rest; but is there rest anywhere to be found for the sole of their feet? To such I say, “Act as if your hopes were facts, and you shall prove them such. Act as if God were, and you shall see Him as He is.” [Note: W. P. Workman, Kingswood Sermons, 195.]
2. It changes doubt into certainty.—Whenwe hear that God loves us, and would have us love Him; when we hear that we cannot love the Father whom we have not seen unless we love the brother whom we have seen; when we hear that because He lives we will live also, or that we can be free only as we obey His law, an& rule only as we serve, and gain the best things only by loss of things inferior; when we hear that He will render to every man the due recompense of his deeds, and that we ought to live therefore as those who must give account to Him: when, in short, we hear any distinctively Christian or spiritual truth, there is that in us which recognizes its truth and responds to it. We are aware that it is that which is best and highest in us that leaps up to greet it and bear witness to it, to assure us that by grasping these truths we will be laying hold of the most noble and precious realities.
But, while that which is spiritual in us moves toward them and incites us to trust in them, flesh and blood bear the other way. These remind us of how much, and how much that is pleasant and dear to them, we will have to give up if we commit ourselves to the truth and suffer it to mould our life. Possibly these unspiritual powers suborn reason itself, and turn it against us. Reason whispers: “But where is the proof that these things are true? Ask for proof; wait for proof. Do not be in haste. These may be realities; they may be, as you assume, the supreme and only realities. But they are very mysterious, and even a little questionable. Do not commit yourself to them till you can see them more clearly, and see too how to reconcile them with each other and with the common and received opinions of men.” And, as we listen, we pause and stand in doubt.
Now that moment is one of the critical moments in our life, one of the moments in which it has to be determined whether we will follow the promptings of the Divine Spirit within our soul, which moves us to risk all for duty, for righteousness, for love, for God; or whether we will at least defer the decision and so make it less likely that we will ever reach it. If we make the venture, if we follow the impulse of that which is deepest and best in us, if we resolve that we will no longer confer with flesh and blood, but yield ourselves to the Spirit that stirs and speaks within us, we emerge from the cold atmosphere of doubt in which all miracles —and above all the great miracle of a radical moral change—are impossible, and rise into that native and genial realm of the spirit in which all things become possible, and all that is spiritual in us ripens and unfolds. The eternal truths which we have seen by faith become ours. We are saved from the thraldom of sense and of the sensible world. We pass out beyond the shows of time to find a higher life in the kingdom of righteousness and joy and peace.
3. It is the condition of vision.—Now, “where no vision is the people perish.” The most powerful advocate of this fact in modern times, perhaps in all time, is William Blake; and he himself is the best example of the connexion between faith and vision. His latest interpreter uses the word “imagination,” but Blake himself would have used “faith” or “wonder.” Speaking of Blake’s Real Man, Charles Gardner says: “His imagination is vision. Imagination is Eternal. Through imagination he feasts at Messiah’s table, drinking the wine of Eternity. Through imagination he enters the great communion of Saints, and with piercing vision detects brothers and sisters among the fallen and outcast. He has passed through the valley of the shadow of Death, and henceforth starts at no shadows, and neither tastes nor sees Death.” [Note: C. Gardner, Vision and Vesture, 99.]
There was a guide
Invisible, went ever at my side.
He said, “Poor timid thing, that cannot dare
To risk the upper air,
The hard ascent
And stony summits, but would ever go
Just high enough for beauty and too low
For desolation, you shall never know,
Thus sheltered by the ring
Of noble dreams and mounting thoughts, the sting
Of truth, the wide horizons of the real.
Turn from the fair,
Climb, strive, slip, fall upon the pent
Of his steep home,
Until you come,
Breathless and spent,
To the bare summits that his world reveal.” [Note: Evelyn Underhill, Theophanies, 59.]
