much to a man who believes in the Father, and more to a man who believes also in the Son; but, practically, God is nothing to any one who is not yielding to the influence of the Holy Ghost. God without us is but a subject of curious speculation. It is God within us that is the sum and substance of all true religion and of all real life.

"We hear His voice when thunders roll

Through the wide fields of air;
The waves obey His dread control,

Yet still He is not there.
Where shall I find Him, O my soul.
Who yet is everywhere?

Oh, not in circling depth or height,
But in the conscious breast;
Present to faith, though veiled from sight,

There doth His Spirit rest.

Oh, come, thou Presence Infinite,

And make Thy creature blest!"

324

The Connection between Reason

and Faith.

I.

THE RELIGIOUS USE OF REASON.

"Be ready to give a reason to every man for the hope that is in you."-1 PET. iii. 15.

"Believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they be of God."-1 JOHN iv. 1.

"Prove all things."-1 THESS. v. 21 [or rather it should be, "test all things; "dokiμáČeтe návтa is the Greek expression. The word Sokμáče is applied first and specially to the testing of metals for the purpose of seeing if they are pure].

TRUE religion involves the harmonious and

complete development of all parts of man's nature. False religion consists in the attempt to get rid of, or to suppress, certain parts in favour of the rest, the senses, for example, in favour of the intellect, or reason in favour of faith. I want to show you in this and the

following sermons that there is nothing incompatible between the last-mentioned faculties, but that, on the contrary, they imply and involve one another.

It is, I am afraid, a very common opinion that the exercise of faith necessitates a violent suppression of reason. Some persons are so afraid of their intellects, so certain their own judgment would lead them astray, that they would seem to regard the human mind, not as the breath of God, but as a corrupting influence infused into man by the devil. Others, again, though not so distrustful of the powers of reason, appear to imagine there is no virtue in believing anything in which there can be perceived the slightest glimmering of meaning. Religion, they think, consists in professing to believe that which cannot be understood. In proportion as they comprehend what they profess, their profession, they fancy, loses its value. Even so wise a man as Bacon was once foolish enough to say, The more incredible anything is, the more honour I do God in believing it." Now the term incredible is equivalent in plain Saxon, as you know, to unbelievable; and unbelievable means incapable of being believed. Bacon's assertion, therefore, amounts to this, that the more in

capable of being believed anything is, the more we honour God in believing it. So that to believe what cannot be believed at all would be the acme of religious achievement! Alas! at that rate the perfection of piety is quite beyond our reach.

But

The absurdity of this determination to set reason at defiance, and to eliminate her altogether from the sphere of religion, may be shown in various ways. In the first place, the irreligiousness of reason has never been proved. Those who object to the use of reason, generally endeavour to justify their objection by some show of argument. They reason against reason. this attempt to prove the worthlessness of reason is self-contradictory. If she be so unreliable, her testimony cannot be relied on against herself. The arguments she provides and accepts may, in this case as in others, be but paralogisms, and therefore she may after all be valid, in spite of her pretended proof of invalidity. Reason, then, can never reason down herself.

In the second place, faith is not, as it is sometimes misrepresented, the belief of what is contrary to reason. "The human spirit is not a thing divided against itself, in which faith and reason subsist side by side, each asserting as

absolute, principles contradicted by the other." Though religion contains much that the reason cannot fully comprehend, yet, in so far as it is true, it can contain nothing that is positively contradicted by the reason. For we are so constituted that we cannot believe a contradiction. No power in the universe, for example, could make us think that we both existed and did not exist in the same indivisible moment of time.1 We might be persuaded that it was desirable for certain purposes to profess a belief in both these contradictory statements, but omnipotence itself could not compel us really to believe them. Now faith cannot require us to say that we are doing what, by the very constitution of our nature, we are for ever precluded from accomplishing.

If

it did, then in order to be religious we must be dishonest, in order to have faith we must first become liars.

In the third place, revelation is not inconsistent with the use of reason, but, on the contrary, implies it. Revelation of course is divine and supernatural: it is an act, or series of acts, on

1 It is scarcely necessary to say that, for this statement to be true, the term "exist" must be used in precisely the same sense in both instances. We must not, e.g., understand "potentially" in one case, and "actually" in the other.