The Witness of Faith: its Experience
Paper Fifth(TOC)
The Witness of Faith: its Experience
"In whom, though now ye see him not, yet believing, ye rejoice with joy unspeakable and full of glory: receiving the end of your faith, even the salvation of your souls"—1 Peter 1:5, 9
The witness of faith is just as conscious an experience as is the witness of the Holy Spirit. It comprises emotions of joy, peace, and gladness peculiar to itself. There is a faith-feeling just as there is a fear-feeling or a love feeling.
There is no true faith without feeling. Who can confide in a friend without any emotion of pleasure? Or who can accept in good faith the promise of another, and not feel a gladness of heart? As Dr. Lowrey wrote some months since, in The Divine Life: The truth is, faith is a matter of feeling. To speak of believing without feeling is very misleading; for where believing begins, feeling also begins. A man without any faith-feeling may begin to believe; but when he does so, he also begins to feel the emotions which accompany faith. Faith is all experience as well as an act of the soul, and the witness of faith is both the consciousness of all act performed and of a feeling experienced. This faith-feeling is just as real as the feeling which is concomitant to the experience of the Holy Spirits witness. And not only so, but in its own kind there is as great an intensity of emotion in the experience of faith as there is in the experience of the Holy Spirits witness.
Joy in believing and joy in the Holy Ghost, though different forms of joy, may both be alike unspeakable and full of glory. When faith is immediate, lively and unwavering, it not only brings salvation and joy in believing, but more-joy unspeakable and full of glory. The experience of the witness of faith is most precious. The following are some of its most interesting phases: