The Use and Power of Faith.

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REV. LEWIS O. BRASTOW, D.D., Yale University.

UR conception of the value of faith will depend upon our conception of its significance. Let us therefore at the outset understand what is meant by it.

In theological discussions faith has often been made synonymous with belief. But faith is surely more than belief. Belief is pre-supposed, but the two are not identical. Faith is the larger word. Faith may include belief, but belief does not as a necessity include faith. Belief is a response and a committal of the mind to an object that is recognized as real or true. Faith is a response and a committal of the entire inner self to an object that is recognized as good. It involves a docile and believing attitude of mind, but it includes also a certain responsiveness of feeling and of conviction and a concurrence of will. In such attitude of self-responsiveness and act of self-committal, faith always recognizes its object as good. It may attribute to its object a good that does not belong to it. That is, knowledge of the object may be defective. But faith always attaches itself to what it conceives to be good. No one trusts what he recognizes as bad. All genuine faith therefore has a certain ethical significance. It is the object of faith that conditions the nature and scope of such ethical significance. The object may possibly be one's self. There is a reasonable and a worthy self-trust. If it be normal, that is, if it be neither too large nor too small, neither too arrogant nor too degrading, neither the self-assertion of pride nor the self-depreciation of conscious self-degradation, it is right and good. Every man should be able to believe

in and trust himself. Entire self-distrust is irrational and immoral. God put strength into manhood and meant that it should be an object of confidence. No one can fight successfully the battle of life otherwise. To distrust one's self in an emergency is to invite defeat. A habit of self-distrust undermines strength. It is never safe to suspend one's self in the uncertainty of self-distrust. A reasonable, well balanced selftrust, held within the limits of a dependent life, is moral. The object may be one's fellow men. No man can stand alone. The world crushes the one who attempts it. It is the necessity of life to believe in and trust one's fellows. It may often prove a misplaced confidence. In so far as it is, it may be irrational and morally defective. But faith cannot be called irrational, in so far as the necessity for it is given in the constitution of the human soul, and in the ordering of human life. To claim that faith, exercised in entire independence of the demonstrations of reason, is irrational, is to impeach the rationality of life itself. Faith in man is rational and it is moral.

The object may be the world in which we live. It is an instinct of faith that impels us to assume the order of the world, and to commit ourselves to it. The world was made to be an object of confidence and we are set over against it with a faithcapacity corresponding, by virtue of which it becomes a constitutional necessity to intrust one's self to it. When this confidence in the world becomes an intelligent self-committal to it, as involving a moral order, it enters the ethical domain. It may thus possibly attain even a religious significance. All sound faith in self, faith in fellow men, faith in the order of the world, may possibly involve a latent or implicit faith in a higher power above all, which is more and other than all, in whom centers the life of man and the constitution of the world. Certain it is that when we bring this question into consciousness, and begin to think rationally and morally, we are obliged to postulate the reality of God as the basis of all rational confidence in the reality and significance of the universe. It is faith as related to this higher object, faith, therefore, not in its technical and theo

logical but in its ethico-religious significance, that I have in mind. And it is the object of this chapter to discuss its use and power in life.

And, first, in mental life, or in the domain of thought and knowledge. We begin to think in the realm of faith. All thought that influences life presupposes faith in thought itself and in the mind that produces it. We trust ourselves before we know ourselves. Indeed, we trust ourselves in order to know ourselves. Faith belongs to that part of our being that operates to a large extent below consciousness and to a still larger extent independently of knowledge. We take ourselves seriously and on trust when we begin to think, and when we attach any significance or worth to the products of our thought. We commit ourselves in good faith to the workings of our own intelligence, and following its lead reach what we believe to be knowledge. And all knowledge is won only on a basis of faith. We commit ourselves also to the faculties that lie below intelligence, and believe that their witness, too, leads to knowledge.

So also do we trust what lies without ourselves. All objects external to ourselves become objects of knowledge only because we are so constituted that we must believe in them. We do not prove them to be valid in order to believe in them and intrust ourselves to them. We believe in and trust the world before we know it. Knowledge of the world and of man is never the measure of our trust in them. All external objects of knowledge are approached along the pathway of faith. Not even a beginning in knowledge is possible without an attitude of good faith in what lies beyond the power of experimental or logical demonstration. And this attitude is necessary at every step and stage of the process up to the end. We assume the reality of the external world. We do not demonstrate it. "By faith we know that the worlds were made." We assume the order and unity of the world before we prove them. Knowledge that comes through the understanding is necessary to correct and regulate faith, but faith is necessary to the knowledge with which the understanding begins and completes its work. We

know God before we prove his existence. We must assume his existence before proof is possible. Knowledge of his reality is given in an experience that is more than rational experience, and it is the knowledge of faith. Thus we know the God of redemption. We see and know nothing as it is until we see and know it from the standpoint of a right relation. We know ethical realities only as we are ethically responsive to them. We know purity, justice, grace, only as we commit ourselves to the objects in which they inhere, become subject to them and test their reality and validity by experiment. Thus we know God in redemption. We believe and trust in order that we may know. Christianity is a revelation from without, but Christianity as a religion is revelation transferred into the domain of experience, and such experience is the experience of faith.

Secondly, its use and power in emotional life, or in the domain of feeling. Life needs uplifting. It needs to be greatened. It is greatened from within. It is the expansive power of noble emotions that exalts our manhood. Largeness of heart is necessary to largeness of manhood. Great things must be felt in order to be known as great. Mental life is dependent upon emotional life. The best intellectual interest in the truth is dependent upon an emotional interest in it. Feeling is an avenue of revelation. We see clearest when we feel deepest the realities of the invisible. The inspired man is he whose whole soul is moved by the power of invisible realities that fill and enlarge him with great emotions. This is the prophet. Are there not exalted states of feeling in which we come to new self-knowledge and to new knowledge of reality external to ourselves? Who can know himself or the world in which he lives, or the God which is in it and behind it until he has felt himself lifted into some height of feeling that is large enough to measure his possibilities? Who can know the grandeur of life until he has been made to feel it? Who can know God until he has been filled with a sense of his greatness and glory? There are emotions that crowd the soul, such, for example, as may have been experienced upon a mountain summit, of such

vastness and such masterful power that the whole wide universe seems new in its awful grandeur, and God gives us, as in a moment, a new revelation of himself and of our existence.

Life needs ennobling. What takes hold of our capacity for noblest enthusiasm in the largest, strongest, and most practical way, must be one of the chief interests of life. Well, now, it is faith that conditions such uplifting of soul. It is this capacity to take in influences from the realm of the invisible and eternal, influences that touch deeper depths of being than the realm of thought, and to commit ourselves to what we recognize as native to us, remote though it often seems, that enlarges us into surprising greatness.

A great religious joy is conditioned by the presence and fellowship of the living God realized in experience through faith. One may prostrate himself in abject humility before the resistless might and majesty of a godless universe, but the soul cannot thus be exalted. Religion greatens the soul because faith brings one into living fellowship with God. The man of faith is always the man of inspiration. The sad lives are the self-centered lives that exalt themselves within the cloud limits of a world from which God has been dismissed. Over against the lives that refuse to bow themselves in trust to a God who has come in redemption, we may set the lives of those who yield themselves even to an illegitimate authority. The Church of Rome can point to lives that have been lifted to great heights of joy by self-surrendering trust. And there may be great elevation of soul in trusting submission to a power which one mistakenly believes to represent the authority of God. Better this than the godlessness that plunges thousands of the poor and degraded, such as this great church once reached, into hopelessness and despair. The isolation and the pride of an age that would dismiss God from the universe are sure to produce a mighty reaction, and men will bow themselves to a church that they may in self-defense rescue their lives from the hardness and impoverishment of a godless secularism. Look at the lives of the masses who have lost faith in God and in the