1. We are now able to make the important statement that the ultimate ground of Christian certainty lies in the positive facts of Christian experience. Is it the assurance of salvation that we desire? The only valid ground for the certainty of salvation is the consciousness of present life in Christ. There is no evidence so indubitable as this. I do not ask external testimony. I do not need intellectual reasonings to convince me that I live. All the reasons that philosophy or science can adduce are powerless against my simple consciousness of life.
So it was with St. Paul. His letters and sermons are full of arguments, no doubt, full of pleadings and persuasion, but they all start from and rest upon his vision of the living, risen Saviour. His last word is always, “When it pleased God to reveal his Son in me”; that was the elemental fact which he proclaimed and which summed up everything, the personal experience from which he started on his career as an apostle. The place of Athanasius as a great religious leader has been obscured by his position as a theologian; but when we turn to his writings, where do we find less of what is commonly called dogmatic theology? There is argument, reasoning, searching for proofs and their statement; but all that belongs to the outworks in his teaching. The central citadel is a spiritual intuition—I know that my Saviour is the God who made heaven and earth. He took his stand firmly and unflinchingly on that personal experience, and all else mattered little compared with the fundamental spiritual fact. It was not his arguments, but his unflinching faith, that convinced his generation.
So it was with Augustine, Bernard, Francis; so it has been with every great religious leader of the Christian people. His strength, whether of knowledge, or of conviction, or of sympathy —his driving power, if the phrase may be used—has always come from direct communion with the unseen, and rests upon the fact, felt and known by himself and communicated to others by a mysterious sympathy, that it has pleased God to reveal Christ in him in some way or other.
So it was with Luther and the Reformation, in which he was the leader. Its driving power was a great religious experience, old, for it has come to the people of God in all generations, and yet new and fresh as it is the nature of all such experiences to be. He knew that his life was hid with Christ in God in spite of all evil, in spite of sin and sense of guilt. His old dread of God had vanished, and instead of it there had arisen in his heart a love to God in answer to the love which came from the vision of the Father revealing Himself. He had experienced this, and he had proclaimed what he had gone through; and the experience and its proclamation were the foundation on which the Reformation was built. Its beginnings were not doctrinal but experimental.
To those who impugn our faith in the Son of God, we have the answer ready with which the man to whom He had given sight met the cavils of Jewish rationalism. “Why herein is a marvellous thing, that ye know not from whence He is, and yet He hath opened mine eyes.” So in moments when we are tempted to doubt or to distrust:
If e’er when faith had fall’n asleep,
I heard a voice “believe no more “
And heard an ever-breaking shore
That tumbled in the Godless deep ;
A warmth within the breast would melt
The freezing reason’s colder part,
And like a man in wrath the heart
Stood up and answer’d “I have felt.” [Note: S. G. Green, The Christian Creed and the Creeds of Christendom, 20.]
2. It is sometimes said that the Reformers made too much of feeling. Thus Osborne: “For most people, this continual centring of religion in their own feelings or experiences is as impossible, unwholesome, and unreal as is the secular ignoring of religion at the other extreme. A healthy religion, like a healthy body, is not always consciously dwelling on its own existence. In the case of minds in which sentiment predominates, this becomes pietism, often no doubt consistent with a deep and tender devotion to our Lord, but always in danger of assuming the hothouse plant attitude to life, of losing the healthy objectivity in doctrine and virility in practice of the Catholic faith. Is there not a real truth in Newman’s remark in one of his Anglican sermons, that ‘Luther found men enslaved to their works, and he left them enslaved to their feelings’? Or at least, if not directly true, it is certainly true of many tendencies of that powerful mind, robust in itself, but over-subjective in the type of religion which it made prevalent.” [Note: C. E. Osborne, Religion in Europe and the World Crisis, 136.]
But this is simply to misunderstand what is meant by feeling. Listen to Bowne: “The oft-repeated dictum ‘feeling proves nothing’ is one of those which, from frequency and vehemence of utterance, have been mistaken for self-evident. It is true only for individual, isolated, and transitory feelings; the great, fundamental, and abiding feelings of the race may prove much. Those who appeal to this dictum are seldom aware to what an extent feeling and sentiment enter into our intellectual life, and even into their own theories. The deepest propositions concerning life, and duty, and character, have no other proof than the moral recoil which attends their denial.
At the same time the only disproof possible is the absence of that recoil. It is an attempt to prove a negative on the strength of negative evidence. Every one in whom the moral nature is active needs no proof of the beauty of holiness; and he regards a denial as we regard a blind man’s protest against the absurd doctrine of vision. In Fenelon’s Telemaque, Ulysses tries to convince one of his crew who has been changed into a hog by Circe, that it is shameful for a man to be a pig, but without success. Here is a point where argument is impossible. If there be no sense of dignity in man nothing can appear degrading. Both in ethics and in esthetics the ultimate fact upon which all theory is built is a movement of the sensibility, which thus founds the distinction of good and bad, beautiful and ugly.
The most rigorous rationalist in morals cannot escape the ultimate appeal to feeling to sanction his theories. The whole mental life, also, springs out of feeling. It is extremely doubtful if a purely perceptive being, without any subjective interests, could attain to rationality, even if its physical existence were secured. Indeed, it is demonstrable that our sentiments outline and control all mental development. Before mental growth can begin, there must be an awakened interest, and when the interest is awakened, the leaden chaos of sense-experience begins to take on intelligible forms. The love of truth, which is the mainspring of science, is only one phase of religious feeling and worship. Truth, as simple correspondence of thought with fact, cannot arouse enthusiasm. It has, indeed, a low value of utility, but nothing on which a soul may live.” [Note: B. P. Bowne, Studies in Theism, 65.]
Whatever I feel, I feel beyond all doubt. If I see blue sky, I may be quite sure that I do experience the sensation of blueness. We are very likely to confuse what we feel with what we associate with it or infer from it; but the whole of our consciousness, so far as it is the result of pure intuition and free from inference, is certain knowledge beyond all doubt.” [Note: F. B. Jevons, Principles of Science, i. 271.]
3. To Christian experience all other grounds of certainty at last arrive and find their value there. The modern proof of the truth of the Bible is its worth for and in Christian experience, and the modern argument for the value of the thought of past ages is that it has expressed and ministered to Christian experience. The Bible itself is a record and interpretation of man’s experience of God; and Church dogma is an attempt to formulate in terms of thought what has seemed essential for man’s experience in God’s revelation. The experience of prophets, apostles, even of Christ Himself, of Fathers and Reformers of the Church, must be verified and vitalized in the soul’s experience of God’s grace.
There is a kind of certainty arising from having oneself “tasted and seen” which on all the levels of knowledge, from the lowest physical one upwards, is felt to be of a superior order to that due to hearsay. Every one recognizes the difference between the man who has merely acquired the theory of any art and the man who has mastered the same by years of practice. It is one thing to learn what love is by the reading of romances and another to learn it by loving and being loved. Not less different is the knowledge of religion due to personal contact with the objects of religion from that due to the testimony of others; and the true aim of all testimony on the subject is to lead us to acquire that knowledge for ourselves.
Both the Bible and the Church have been far too often represented as making demands on the individual—demands to believe what they teach on pain of perdition. It is a far juster view of both to regard them as approaching the individual with promises that, if he seek God, he shall find Him. From prophets and apostles, from fathers and doctors comes the testimony that, when in their sin and misery they stretched forth their hands, they encountered not vacancy but a living God and Saviour; and the intention of their testimony is not that we should adopt as our creed that which they regarded as true, but that, when in the stress of our own life and the consciousness of our own misery we lift our eyes to the hills, we should be able to do so with hope of finding what they found. And, if we have found it, our impressions of its reality and blessedness will be of the same nature as theirs. It may be mediated through their testimony, yet it will be immediate, the soul and God, the sinner and the Saviour, coining into direct contact; and, when we are experiencing the blessedness of this union with the actual objects of the spiritual world, we can say to every witness, including even the Bible, “Now we believe, not because of thy saying: for we have heard him ourselves, and know that this is indeed the Christ, the Saviour of the world.” (Joh_4:42)
In a true sense the Church is authoritative and the Scriptures are authoritative. It is, however, not an authority of compulsion, but the authority of inspiration. It is the authority of conviction, and there is no spiritual value in any other. It is an authority which makes its way, not by forcing assent, but by winning it through an appeal to that which is “likest God within the soul.” Every attainment in religion is the result, not of submission to some outward law or external authority, but of obedience to a law which has become the very essence and principle of our own being. [Note: R. M. Jones, A Dynamic Faith, 20.]
4. The faith of experience is at once firm and fearless. It is confident of the ground under its feet and, therefore, it cordially welcomes all investigation and all new light It is so in any realm of life, in every field of science.
Here is that mysterious something, that tremendous force whose essential nature we can probably never penetrate, called electricity. Many are the hypotheses and speculations which the theoretical scientists construct to explain and interpret it. What is our attitude of mind toward those various theories? Probably it is an attitude which is at once fearless and expectant. We know what this great force has done for us and is doing for us every day; bow it runs our machinery, drives our vehicles, lights our houses, flashes our messages over the wires or through the viewless air; how it performs a thousand services for us daily. We are confident, absolutely confident, that it is all that it has proved itself to be in our own experience and the experience of mankind. How much more it shall prove itself to be on deeper study and larger application, we cannot tell. Therefore we leave investigation and inquiry absolutely free, confident that they cannot take from us anything that we already have, sure that they will reveal to us greater wonders yet undreamed of.
Even so in the realm of religion. It is just as sure and certain ground as the realm of natural science. For the objects and facts of spiritual experience are surely as real as the objects and facts of physical experience. Only in both cases the hypotheses and interpretations shift and vary. For example, we know that the Bible is inspired, because it inspires us. We are, therefore, ready to give Biblical criticism a free hand, confident that a reverent, searching scholarship will bring to us yet larger utterances of the Word of God, for we know, with the old Puritan Divine, that “God bath yet more light to break forth from His Holy Word.”
5. Since the certainty of individual salvation in Christ comes solely out of the personal consciousness of Christian life it is capable of growth. The certainty of a saintly man like St. Paul —the certainty which is produced by a long Christian experience that rests upon what Christ has been, in the manifold necessities of a strenuous life, in its arduous duties, fierce temptations, sore conflicts, depressions, and sorrows—becomes an absolute feeling, as indubitable as life itself.
It ought to be a constantly growing experience, for there is always more in God than any one has made his own, and no one has ever exhausted the unsearchable riches of Christ. These attainments of Christian experience are the equivalents of the statements of the Bible and the propositions of the creed; but they are the Bible and the creed transmuted into meat and drink, so that they may become bone of a man’s bone and flesh of his flesh. This is the certainty of which Luther used to say that on a dying bed it is not enough to be assured by even the angel Gabriel that our religion is true; we must be as sure of it as that three and two are five or that an ell is longer than half-an-ell; we must be so sure of it that, if the whole world declared it to be false, we could quietly and joyfully rest on our own conviction.
There are only two provinces of absolutely sure knowledge; one is pure mathematics and the other is the experience of the soul. When we say “The whole is greater than the part” we are stating an axiom which is embedded in our constitutions, and in order to contradict it you would have to reconstitute the mind, and for that matter the universe. This axiom belongs to the nature of things, and the Almighty Himself could not make the part greater than the whole. When St. Paul says “I know” in religion he is falling back upon his spiritual consciousness. First, he realized Christ in Heaven at the right hand of God, next he observed Christ doing great wonders in his own life, and finally he found Christ in his own soul. He was now united to the Lord after so close a fashion that for him to live was Christ, and his life was hid with Christ in God. None could shake his faith, for he carried Christ within him, none could separate him from the Lord, for he was with Christ in the heavenly places. [Note: J. Watson, The Inspiration of our Faith, 223.]
