1. Faith is in the Person of Christ: it is also with our own personality. Now the personality of man is usually regarded as made up of three elements—intellect, emotion, will. The faith of the New Testament can be readily analysed into these three elements. Sometimes the intellectual factor (as belief) operates most prominently, at other times the emotional (as a feeling of trust) bears sway, and yet again the moral side (as purposeful surrender) at times appears in the forefront. Faith is a complex state of mind in which all these elements are present within the personality. But one or other, according to the temperament and disposition of the subject, takes the lead and gives character to the whole state.
The mind of man is a unity, consisting of intellect, emotion, and will, blending inextricably and with incessant variations in every life. No one can keep these in perfect balance; every one is constitutionally biassed to one or other of them. The man of intellect will emphasize thought in his religion; his brother will find his religious nature most fully satisfied in emotion; while a third will realize himself in (it may be) social service. All three —intellect, emotion, will—are present in every act of the mind, but present in varying degrees, and in the practical work of the Church this variation is clearly exhibited.
(1) The man whose bias is intellectual inclines to lay emphasis on doctrine, which is the intellectual interpretation of religious experience. He would probably argue that there is nothing more likely to lead to a spiritual experience than a statement of spiritual truth. In every other sphere, systematic thinking is considered necessary; why should any one try to minimize its importance in the most vital of human interests? Sooner or later we must ask whether religion is a reality: “Is it true?” we demand; and the wisdom of a man will be seen in his laying hold of what the most experienced believe to be the truth. Our man of intellect therefore lays stress on creeds and confessions, suspects innovations in doctrine, and has no patience with heresy in Church or school. He will also show an aversion to stirring up feelings in the minds of the young, or attempting to test men’s Christianity by their feelings and by the experiences through which they have passed.
(2) The man of emotions, on the other hand, contends that you may believe all the creeds and remain unchanged in heart and will. He calls the intellect cold, critical, hard, while he holds that what is needed to make a Christian is a tender, broken, and contrite heart. He is glad, therefore, to see that men are moved, and only when they are moved in a meeting does he say it was living, and obviously under the power of the Spirit. When a revival is manifesting itself in a community, the men of emotion work to gather crowds together; they expect excitement and approve of contrivances by which it is increased—the outbursts of singing, public confession of sin, sudden surprises by shouting or movement. There are plans by which a mass of men and women can be rendered pliable, or “suggestible,” i.e. easily moved by an address. These men argue that the main difficulty in saving men from the power of sin is the first step, the surmounting of a barrier which custom, habit, or the fear of men’s judgment has placed in their way, and that it is most easily surmounted in a great wave of emotion. After that has been done, it is easy to instruct the beginner in doctrine and to lead him to Christian work.
(3) The third type is the man of will, who believes that the deepest thing in life is neither an intellectual proposition concerning God nor an emotion, but an action. Intellect and emotion may have a work of their own, but the essential matter is that we do something. He does not much care whether people think for themselves or not, if only they act aright. The thinking of most men is of little avail; let them obey, for it is by obedience that they come to the knowledge of doctrine. Accordingly men of this type come to insist on law and order. They point to the commandments, and regulations, and methodical ways of God.
2. Each of these elements of our personality finds its appropriate expression.
(1) The intellect is the instrument of knowledge. Faith, says Scripture, cometh by hearing. John the Baptist, we are told, came for a witness, that all men might believe through him. And St. Paul asks, “What then is Apollos? and what is Paul? Ministers through whom ye believed.” (1Co_3:5)
(2) Feeling expresses itself in affection between one person and another. The knowledge of “the Name of Christ,” of the revelation, that is, of the Father and of the Son, involves and issues in love. “Beloved, let us love one another; for love is of God; and every one that loveth is begotten of God, and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love.” (1Jn_4:7)
(3) The will finds its expression in action. Love must, if it be real, prove itself in action. “Hereby know we love, because he laid down his life for us: and we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren. But whoso hath the world’s goods, and beholdeth his brother in need, and shutteth up his compassion from him, how doth the love of God abide in him? ” “If a man say, I love God, and hateth his brother, he is a liar: for he that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, cannot love God whom he hath not seen.”
Christian faith is an operation of the whole nature, into which the practical powers enter as surely as the intellectual, and an article of the Christian creed is not really believed, until there is in the practical life of the believer a movement corresponding to the movement in the intelligent life. When he believes that the Father creates or the Spirit sanctifies, he not only thinks something—he feels something and he does something; there is an emotion that corresponds to the conception, and there is, so far as opportunity for it is present, an action too. If these fail, he has not believed the thing: his act is not faith. [Note: J. H. Skrine, Pastor Agnorum, 239.]
3. As each of these elements of our personality has its own expression, so one is not to be fostered or commended at the expense of another. There is nothing more futile than the attempt to offer to God something we do not possess—to whip up emotions when we were meant to reflect, to waste our life in public work when our gift is for seclusion, or to labour vainly at erudition when we have a genius for the reclaiming of our outcast fellow-men.
The charity of Christian men is widening, for they see that souls may be redeemed in many ways, and may reach the presence of the Father along paths that lie far apart. It matters little which we travel, if we come home at last.
My conviction is that we can do nothing—not even remain passive—without the consent of the image (sometimes perverted) of God which is in us. I mean that mysterious Trinity—the Intellect, the Will, and Affections. The Will is, I think, incapable of producing belief without the concurrence of the other two—but they in their turn are equally so without the Will. This doctrine is most precious to me. About this time last year, my faith was fearfully shaken, because, upon one day honestly examining it, I found that it was not based upon pure intellectual conviction. Not knowing the true nature of belief, I thought I was wrong in believing any longer; so, to my infinite anguish, I suspended my belief till such time as I should see better reason for holding it. Several months of inexpressible misery were spent by me. I could arrive at nothing beyond the strongest probability in favour of Christianity. At length it seemed to me that Bishop Butler had taught that mere probability is the foundation of all our belief. Set in the right train of thought by this recollection, I soon arrived at what to me is an inestimable truth, and my faith has never been in the slightest degree shaken since. Directly a doubt suggests itself, I say, “Is all probability in favour of Christianity? ” My intellect answers in the affirmative. My heart loves that of whose existence my intellect allows the probability, and my will puts the seal to the blessed compact which produces faith. What is there that we should believe if we insisted upon absolute proof of the intellect? [Note: Memoirs and Correspondence of Coventry Patmore, ii. 146.]
4. Faith is not a matter of thinking, feeling, or willing separately, but an act in which the whole personality is involved. “Every genuine act of faith,” says Julius Hare, “is the act of the whole man, not of his Understanding alone, not of his Affections alone, not of his Will alone, but of all three in their central aboriginal unity. It proceeds from the inmost depths of the soul, from beyond that firmament of Consciousness, whereby the waters under the firmament are divided from the waters above the firmament. It is the act of that living principle which constitutes each man’s individual, continuous, immortal personality.” [Note: J. C. Hare, The Victory of Faith, 46.]
Faith is not an activity of the intellect only; for studying a railway time-table, and believing that a train starts for London at a certain hour, will not bring a man into that great city. Nor is faith an activity of the affections only; for your feeling gratefully confident in the safety of travel by your favourite railway company, while you remain at home seated in your cosiest arm-chair, will not remove you from one place to another. Nor yet is faith an activity of the will only; for the will, unless urged by desire and enlightened by the intellect, would act aimlessly and uselessly. When, in faith, you make a venture, and when, in doubt, you hesitate, all the parts of your soul are active; your intellect thinks, your heart desires or feels averse, and your will decides or remains in suspense.
Faith is not a matter of the head alone, nor of the heart alone, nor of any part of the spiritual man taken by itself. It is something which belongs to the whole spiritual character, and which affects every part of it. Sometimes it is intellectual, and then it embodies itself in the formation of or the assent to creeds. Sometimes it is emotional, and then it shows itself in strong love and loyalty towards God. Sometimes it is volitional, and shows itself by active deeds of charity and self-sacrifice. But in each case it is the act of the whole man, and not of any separate part of him, which is, let me say in passing, good philosophy as well as sound theology and sound practice. [Note: F. Relton, in The Expository Times, v. 262.]
5. When we recognize faith as an act of the whole person we are able to give it its widest significance. We see that, in the words of Canon Scott Holland, it is “an elemental energy of basal self,” that is, something that is perfectly natural to the best nature we have. It rises spontaneously from our deepest being, and is as natural as a child’s faith and trust in its father and mother.
The best illustrations of faith are those drawn from our everyday life. By faith a child is enabled to live, to draw its very breath and food of daily existence from those by whom it came into the world; to look at them with deep, clear, trusting eyes, believing all they say, and believing them utterly and completely good. By faith the child, grown older, lives its intellectual life, sitting at the feet of master and teacher and pastor, and books and nature, and its own intuitive perceptions of things, and learning thence first to believe and to obey, in order that hereafter it may be able to obtain self-mastery, and to subdue all knowledge under its feet. By faith the lover looking into his mistress’ face learns the secret of her soul, and in the glory of his “maiden passion for a maid” gains oftentimes his first glance at the glory of the Divine Love, a glory which first makes him tremble and then stand firm. By faith the man, battling with the world within and the world without, learns to discern a Power higher than himself and yet within himself, fighting on his side against all unreality and unrighteousness and error, and, by the consciousness of his daily victory, becomes one with that which thus he learns to know, until the faith of God becomes his faith, and he cries in the rapture and exultation of triumph, “I have fought a good fight, I have kept the faith” (2Ti_4:7). By faith the man when his work is done is content to know this world but a shadow, its prizes but illusions, its hopes but phantoms, its gains but losses, and to trust himself to his unseen Pilot to cross the Bar into the unknown land “where beyond these voices there is peace.” In a word, faith is the sustaining and uplifting power that enables us to see Him who is invisible, and seeing to endure. It is the eye of the spiritual man to which is vouchsafed a vision of the eternal realities lying behind and beneath all temporal and passing phenomena. It is the ear of the soul catching the sound of the celestial harmonies heard often faintly but surely above the discord and wailing of the threnodies of earth. It is the spiritual hand stretching upward into the darkness, until, caught by the hand of the Unseen, it holds It and is held by It. It is the spiritual tongue singing the song of Zion in a strange land, and praising God even when His face is hidden, as we think, from us. Such is faith, a spiritual power, a spiritual force, a spiritual reality.
Faith addresses itself to Man’s whole being—it sounds every depth; it touches every spring; it calls back the soul from its weary search within itself, full of doubt and contradiction; it presents it with an object, implicit, absolute, greater than itself —“One that knoweth all things.” It provides for every affection, every want and aspiration. Faith stretches itself over humanity as the prophet stretched himself above the child—eye to eye, mouth to mouth, heart to heart; and to work a kindred miracle, to bring back life to the dead, by restoring the One to the One—the whole nature of Man to the whole nature of God. [Note: Dora Greenwell, The Patience of Hope, 56.]
6. But in giving faith its widest significance we must see that we do not rob it of its saving force. Certainly to St. Paul the word meant more than intellectual assent. He thought of faith as issuing from the centre of man’s personality and expressing his volitional and affectional nature, in that he says with the heart man believeth unto righteousness. The same applies to the description of the specifically Christian principle as a faith that works by love. To the same effect also is the representation that faith is a means of vital union with Christ, so uniting its subject to Him that it becomes appropriate to speak of a mutual indwelling. In short, it is manifest that the faith which Paul exalts as the condition of salvation signifies nothing less than a thorough self-committal to God in Christ. It stands for this great ethical deed, and so contains implicitly not a little that might be designated by other names. By virtue of necessary connexions thorough self-committal to God in Christ involves a penitent forsaking of sin, a loyal confession of Christ, and a sincere espousal of the path of obedience to the known will of God.
Paul did not suppose that faith saves in its own virtue as a work or personal performance. The antithesis which he makes between salvation by works and salvation by the free gift of God in Christ emphatically negatives a supposition of that sort. The method of faith, he distinctly affirms, is the method according to grace. He conceives, therefore, of faith as the graciously appointed condition of salvation rather than its meritorious ground. It is not necessary, however, to imagine that he rated it as a mere indifferent instrument, serving by appointment a useful purpose, but having no ethical worth in itself. Without doubt he considered it to be intrinsically a noble and ennobling activity of the human spirit, and he has indicated as much by placing it alongside of hope and love among the things that have abiding worth.
Jesus Christ is making His appeal to the whole of our life; He is offering us the whole of Himself to be appropriated by the whole of ourselves. He is offering us His life in exchange for ours. He is offering us Himself in exchange for ourselves, His divinity for our humanity; and all that He asks of us is not that we should adjust ourselves to a certain opinionative attitude toward Him—we shall do that all right in time if we do this other—but that we should bring ourselves, as He Himself put it, into the temperament and atmosphere of a little child. “Except ye be converted and become as little children, ye shall never enter, ye shall not even recognize, the kingdom of Heaven.” [Note: R. E. Speer, The Master of the Heart, 68.]
When a man sees the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ he sees with his whole being. In mind he lets the Incarnate enter him; he thinks the Incarnation. He clears away from his mental retina false images, as an “early disciple” had to clear from his prejudice of his false Messianism, or Paul his Pharisaism, and receives upon it the image of a Jesus who is God; fastens his attention on the spiritual order of things behind the visible; ventures the intellectual venture by which we trust our conclusion that the spiritual is there indeed; searches the scriptures of the Book and of Nature, to know whether these things are so, with the dry light of a pure intention, seeking not himself but truth; in brief, makes that surrender of mind to fact which is in lesser matters the virtue of philosopher and scientist.
In the affections he admits the Incarnate. He turns from the desired things, in which a man is seeking only himself—from the gold, the wine, the food, the passion, sensuality, and that “last infirmity”—and fills the hunger of the heart with Christ, made of a woman, that he might be sought and found by the mortal’s love; sought and found, as by an a Kempis rapturing in his cloister, or by a Catharine doing mercies in the street for the brethren, in whom she does it unto Him.
And in his action he receives the Incarnate. For his willing is the willing away of the self to let the Father’s will, discovery in Jesus of Nazareth, be done by an imitatio Christi, An imitation, not as that cloistered one has planned it, not a Christ-like submissiveness only, but also a Christlike forcefulness, of striving, toiling, getting and spending, of war, adventure, conquest, rule.
This then is the Response; thus the soul adjusts itself to the fact in its environment, the Son of God become incarnate in Jesus born at Bethlehem. [Note: J. H. Skrine, What is Faith? 167.]
The law of faith
Working through love, such conquest shall it gain,
Such triumph over sin and guilt achieve?
Almighty Lord, thy further grace impart!
And with that help the wonder shall be seen
Fulfilled, the hope accomplished; and thy praise
Be sung with transport and unceasing joy. [Note: Wordsworth, “The Excursion,” bk. ix.]
