1. We may base our faith, then, upon the authority of the Church or upon the authority of the Bible, or upon both. But these are not the only possible foundations. For we may trust to argument or to intuition. Both are possible, though only one seems to receive the blessing of full assurance.
(1) The apostle Thomas may be taken as an example of the first; he desired to possess a faith. To possess a faith is to find God, and His relation to man, and His self-revelation in the Incarnation, and the sonship of the race, as Leverrier found the planet Neptune, by inference; through the exercise of the faculties which are purely intellectual. Such a man says: “I desire to find God; but whoever made me gave me my brain. I am so constituted that logic stands as a gate-keeper at the door of my emotional nature, and will let nothing pass that cannot be framed into a syllogism.” This was the mental attitude of Thomas. In the well-known statue of this apostle, at Copenhagen, he is represented with a measuring rod in his hand, as though he would measure, by the capacity of the human mind, any theory of God offered for the acceptance of his faith. He has been blamed; reverent inquiry has been stigmatized as rationalistic doubt; obedience to the injunction “prove all things” has been condemned as unjustifiable scepticism.
(2) The other alternative, “being possessed by a faith,” is perhaps best illustrated by the apostle Peter. It is less easy of definition, for its action is outside the terms of our experience; but it is the providential opening of the spiritual sense, the awakening of an intuitive faculty, the quickening into activity of an inward vision. It is an endowment bestowed by the Spirit of God; no man is responsible for not possessing it. When, under its influence, Peter made his brilliant confession of the nature of the Christ, the Lord turned round upon him with a gesture of surprise, “Flesh and blood did not tell you that; you have not received that through your intellect. Blessed art thou, Simon Barjona, for this has been revealed to thee by the Father in heaven.” (Mat_16:17) Robertson describes this inward vision as “the something within which makes a thing seem to be true because it is loved.” Tennyson etherializes it in the words:
Her faith is fixt and cannot move,
She darkly feels him great and wise,
She dwells on him with faithful eyes,
“I cannot understand: I love.”
Neither of these definitions is exhaustive, because to the soul possessed by a faith things do not “seem” to be true, they “are” true; and Tennyson’s words, “cannot understand,” are inappropriate, because the intense conviction of the truth arrived at by awakened intuition is far above what we call “understanding.”
2. A man follows the method of argument when he holds that his Christian belief is to be proved, like his belief in the truths of politics or nature, by the processes of reason; as when he says that the resurrection of Jesus is made certain by evidence which would convince a court of law. Or when he says that the religion of Christ is based on historic facts which are verified as all history is, that is, by inductive reasoning, or on the personal experiences of believers, which again is an induction. Or yet again, when he holds the articles of the faith contained in the Creeds because they may be proved by most certain warrants of Holy Scripture, which is another logical process, that of deduction.
Suppose we set out to prove that Jesus of Nazareth was the Son of God. We should first examine the source of this hypothesis, the Christian tradition, by inquiry into the authorship and date of the Gospels, the purity of their text, the character, moral and intellectual, of the witnesses from whose record the tradition started; not forgetting to consider the value of the witness which exists outside the canonical writings, that, namely, of the continuous Christian consciousness of Churchmen, as expressed in the writings of theologians or in institutions of the society. We should examine too the practical results upon conduct and mind of the Christian creed, and decide whether these could be accounted for only by that creed’s being a record of fact. Further, we should compare the Christian theory of man and his destiny with what observation tells us of other reality—physical, intellectual, moral nature—and decide whether this reality and our own theory were in disagreement or in harmony.
What is likely to be the result? The result might be a verification of our hypothesis or it might be a falsification; likelier yet it would be an open verdict. To the question, “What think ye of Christ—is He of heaven or of men?” the answer would be, “We cannot tell.”
Of other things which are popularly called religion, I have my opinion positive and negative. But religion to me is not opinion—it is certainty. I cannot govern my actions or guide my deepest convictions by probabilities. The laws which we are to obey and the obligations to obey them are part of my being of which I am as sure as that I am alive. The things to argue about are by their nature uncertain, and therefore it is to me inconceivable that in them can lie Religion. [Note: Life of Froude, 431.]
3. We follow the method of intuition when we find the root of religious certainty in the immediate and intuitive perception or consciousness of God. Not mere intellectual certainty—for, as Bergson has so well shown, the intellect is only a special faculty or adaptation of the mind or soul, a kind of whittling down of the whole consciousness to serve immediate and limited purposes—but the certainty of that intuition which is the vision of the whole soul in consciousness. As the soul recognizes the spiritual world and appropriates it to himself there awakens within the soul an inward certitude. This certitude is not gained once for all, any more than human freedom is so gained; it must be sought ever anew and obtained by the highest activity of the whole man, be he small or great, ignorant or learned, as we divide and estimate individuals. “He that willeth to do his will shall know.” Certainty is dependent not upon our capacity, but upon the completeness of our response to the Divine. A man must sell all that he has to obtain this pearl of great price. It broadens and deepens with the growth of the consciousness and experience of God.
It seems to me that Bishop Wilkinson’s strength lay in the fact that the core and centre of his faith was an exquisitely simple one—an intuition, for which “certainty” is but a halting word, of the Fatherhood of God and of His hourly care for men, made manifest in the Life and Love of Jesus Christ. His whole purpose was to realize this presence at every moment of his life, and to lead others to realize it. [Note: A. C. Benson, The Leaves of the Tree, 127.]
It was this private certainty in regard to truth and all things that Blake shared with the greatest minds of the world, and men doubted him partly because he was content to possess that certainty and had no desire to use it for any practical purpose, least of all to convince others. He asked to be believed when he spoke, told the truth, and was not concerned with argument or experiment, which seemed to him ways of evasion. He said :
“It is easy to acknowledge a man to be great and good, while we -
Derogate from him in the trifles and small articles of that goodness,
Those alone are his friends who admire his minutest powers.” [Note: A. Symons, William Blake, 245.]
That there is no knowing, in the sense of written reasons, whether the soul lives on or not, I am fully aware. I did not hope or fear. At least while I am living I have enjoyed the idea of immortality, and the idea of my own soul. If then, after death, I am resolved without exception into earth, air, and water, and the spirit goes out like a flame, still I shall have had the glory of that thought.
It happened once that a man was drowned while bathing, and his body was placed in an outhouse near the garden. I passed the outhouse continually, sometimes on purpose to think about it, and it always seemed to me that the man was still living. Separation is not to be comprehended; the spirit of the man did not appear to have gone to an inconceivable distance. As my thought flashes itself back through the centuries to the luxury of Canopus, and can see the gilded couches of a city extinct, so it slips through the future, and immeasurable time in front is no boundary to it. Certainly the man was not dead to me. [Note: R. Jefferies, The Story of my Heart, 28.]
4. Yet there is a place for reason and argument. Again and again has the awakening of the intuitive been the direct result of the cultivation of the intellectual. This was the experience of Kingsley; it all comes out in the conversations in Hypatia. He hungered to find God; he drank deep of the cup of scientific research; he convinced himself that logically there was but one substance, and that one substance was God. When he arrived at that point “he possessed a faith.” He wanted more; the hunger of his human heart was not satisfied; he followed sequences logically. If all phenomena were expressions of the one substance, God, and if humanity were the highest of these expressions, then the noblest specimen of humanity was the most perfect expression of God, and by consequence wholly Divine. Therefore Jesus was God. And though Jesus was God under a limitation, still God was at the same time in all things. And as his mind ascended this sequence step by step, the Spirit of God within him glowed brighter and brighter, because, with Thomas, he proved all things. And his dying words, so calm, and true, and trusting, witnessed that he was passing to the endless life with God, not as the “possessor of a faith,” but as one whose faith, pure, simple, and intense, had now “possessed him.”
The church must find room for the individual thinker in his attempts to work out into more and more logical expression the belief of the church. We have said some hard things about the logician. We have had in mind the type of thinker who imagines that strict logical procedure is everything and who fancies that the correct rule is logic first and life afterward. We now insist that in her attempts to meet the religious demands of men in her seizures of thought-positions the church must make provision for the satisfaction of intelligent logical needs. The logician does not discover, but he can do a great deal to straighten out and put in order what has been discovered. The church has seized the great highways of the truth, the highways which lead to the kingdom, but the logician can straighten the curves and reduce the grades. He may even upon occasion put up a sign of “No thoroughfare” to the right hand or to the left. The great highways across the mountains of our land were not discovered by the scientific surveyors. The hunters and traders had found the passes before the surveyors, and the savages had travelled them before the traders, and the wild beasts before the savages. Civilization, however, needed the fine work of the surveyor in levelling and straightening a way for the later comers. Mankind has from the beginning been travelling along the line of certain instincts and aspirations and assumptions. The trained thinker, who recognizes the limitations of his craft, can do immense help in straightening and broadening the church’s right of way. [Note: F. J. McConnell, in Methodist Review. xc. 230.]
