The Moral Place Of Faith
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ence—that of a tendency to resist the voice.
It is the voice that wakens his sense of responsibility ; it is his tendency to resist the voice that makes his sense of guilt.
And it is from the conflict of both that the question comes—What must I do to be saved?
Christianity did not, start that problem, religion did not start that problem ; it is, first and foremost, a problem dictated by the, daily life and common needs of man.
Christianity has added no new need to the soul; it has. only flashed a fresh light upon the needs of nature.
The starting-point of Christianity 1s the want of nature—the absence of a peace within the soul.
What, then, is the moral method by which Christianity meets this moral want of man?
Its method is at once simple and profound.
It proposes to begin the moral education, of the soul by an appeal to the child-life.
It proposes that man should enter on his training for the kingdom of heaven by a precisely analogous process to that which constitutes his tuition for the kingdom of earth.
This is the deep thought which Christ means to suggest when He sets a little child in the midst of His disciples, the deep principle He designs to convey when He declares that the spirit of childhood is essential to participation in the life of God.
For, let us consider what is the method by which the child first enters on the knowledge of this world.
It is in some form or other the study of a picture-book.
It sees in objects the symbols G
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of men; inmen the symbols of thought.
Unto the child, without a parable, life speaketh not.
Its first idea of everything must be an embodied idea.
It can only love virtue by loving the virtuous man.
It cannot learn the maxims of the copy-book as long as they are not translated into experience.
Before all things it must see the action, the form, the life.
It must learn to admire the deed as the deed of an historical being, must long to emulate the act as the act of an heroic man.
'The birth of its virtue will coincide with the birth of its heroworship ; its reverence for greatness will be the reverence for a person.
When we turn now to the childhood of Christianity we are confronted by a very similar spectacle.
The entire aim of that religion is at the outset to draw back the mind of man into that mode of perceiving truth which characterised his early days.
It calls him to behold moraltruth in a parable, 7.e.,in the picture ofahuman life.
That which flashes before the view of infant Christendom is not an abstract idea, but the figure of a man—a man whose every word, whose every deed, is a professed appeal to the intuitions of the childlife.
He acts by symbols, He speaks by parables, He wins by ministration to the common needs with which every child can sympathise.
He meets the world as a world, in its daily toils and commonplace wants.
He calls to Him those who labour and those who are heavy-laden.
He breaks the bread to famished multitudes in the desert.
He takes up
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the cross of paralytics, lepers, demoniacs.
He throws himself into contact with the weak ones of the earth, those who had proved themselves unfit for the battle of life, and He reveals to their hearts the glad assurance that life even for them has not lost all its glory.
That is the form in which Christian morality first addresses itself to the Christian consciousness.
It is the form in which all truth everywhere begins to speak—the form of asymbol.
The child-life of humanity is placed in front of a sensuous stage, ostensibly to see, really to learn.
It is attracted first only by the images of things, and it is through its admiration of the images that the things themselves enter in.
Christianity has only followed the universal law of development when it says, '' Except ye be converted and become as little children, ye cannot enter into the kingdom of heaven."
But let us advance a step further.
We have said that the child-life of humanity, while it is seemingly only a spectator, is in reality a learner, and this in the present instance is pre-eminently true.
All the time the infant-life of Christendom was to outward appearance merely gazing on a human image, it was unconsciously imbibing a new moral nature, becoming the recipient of another and a higher life.
Yet it is just here that for the first time we are confronted by that element in Christian morality which constitutes at once its special feature and its peculiar difficulty.
Were you to ask a Jew what
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use there is in looking on the vision of a good man's life, his answer would be, It will help you, by its example, to keep the moral law.
But if you were to ask a Christian of the first century in what way a man is to receive good from the vision of Christ, his answer would be seemingly the opposite.
He would not tell you in the first instance that the advantage of such a vision lay in the incentive it gave to moral practice; he would say, "' We are justified by faith!"
An answer so strange and paradoxical—an answer which by the earliest age of the Christian Church itself was felt to involve a orave and arduous problem—certainly demands our full and free consideration.
That it is not a matter of purely theological import may be inferred from the fact that the principle which it involves is made to underlie all theology. or it is quite true what Dr. Stanley Leathes says, that the relation which Christ required of His disciples was above all others the relation of faith—the believing attitude of soul."
Not only does He require that attitude more prominently than all others, He asks it previous to all others.
He will not even display His power until He has found faith in the man who desires to see it.
He values faith, not as an evidence of theological training, but as a preparation for theological training.
He looks upon the power to believe as a part of man's moral nature, and it is because He desires an approach from the * Religion of the Christ, p. 229.
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Iot moral nature of man that He seeks before all things an evidence of faith.
; And yet, after all, is faith a moral act?
Such is the question which with ever-increasing power is pressing upon the nineteenth century.
It would be a great mistake, however, to imagine that it isa purely modern question ; it is as old as Christianity, and in one sense older.* It gave rise to a Jewish party in the Christian Church; it generated an intellectual schism in the Jewish Church; it has agitated human nature outside of all Churches.
It is not merely that an intellectual belief in the historical facts of Christianity is to be found side by side with the most corrupt moral practices; St.
James himself saw this when he cried, "' The devils believe and tremble."
But the question which chiefly presses upon the mind is concerned with a deeper difficulty.
It does not so much ask whether men are living up to their belief, as whether their belief itself has any moral value.
To the modern mind especially the inquiry presents itself as a matter of vital interest.
It asks, Why do we call a man good?
Is it for what he does, or is it for what he believes?
If it is for what he believes, why is not all belief of equal value?
If a man says, I believe in the accuracy of the narrative of Josephus, we should no more think of calling him virtuous than we should think of calling him discerning.
Yet what is the difference between * See Farrar's Karly Christianity, II. p 79, sq.
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the man who makes such an averment and the man who says, I believe in the narratives of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John?
Is not the one as much as the other expressing his conviction of the truth of an historical fact?
Nevertheless the verdict of religious opinion treats these men very differently ; it regards the belief of the first as a thing morally indifferent; it calls the faith of the second a proof of Divine grace.
If the first man should at any time come to the conclusion that the narrative of Josephus is not accurate, he would not be esteemed morally either better or worse.
If the second man were at any time to reach the conviction that a similar inaccuracy attached to the evangelical narrative, the verdict of religious opinion would pronounce upon him a sentence of condemnation; he would be called a sceptic.
How are we to explain this seeming inconsistency ? how are we to vindicate the morality of faith ?
The first step towards such a vindication is to distinguish two things which the popular view is apt to confound—the scholastic and Scriptural meaning of the word faith.
In the scholastic sense faith signifies merely an assent of the intellect.
Now, we have no hesitation in saying that a merely intellectual assent can have only an intellectual value, and that the possession of such a faith does not render a man good or bad.
It may be said indeed, Is not a man who believes in a future life more likely to lead a good life here than
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a man who does not?
To this we must answer, It depends entirely on the moral character of that future in which he believes.
We can conceive circumstances in which such a man would be positively the worse for his belief.
Let us suppose that his conception of future happiness is the Mohammedan one of a heaven of selfish indulgence and unrestrained libertinism; will any man say that his faith in the future is not an absolute hindrance to his moral development?
Christian theology, indeed, has extruded from its heaven the element of libertinism, but has it always extruded the element of selfish indulgence?
We shall not here discuss the point; we shall only say that if ever such an ingredient should enter into the conception of the Christian heaven, it would render the Christian's faith in immortality immoral—a barrier to his spiritual progress, and.a death to his
Divine aspirations.
The same may be said of any other dooma.
If it be asked, for example, if a man's life is not likely to be better for believing in the Divinity of Christ, it must again be answered, that it depends solely on the moral sense he attaches to the word Divine.
There have been men in pre-Christian religions who have worshipped physical power, brute force, ability to crush the weak.
To such men these things were the essence of divinity; and for that very reason they were to them a source of immorality.
Men followed that which they admired.
They looked
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upon physical oppression as an object of worship, and it was only natural they should look upon it as an object of emulation.
If their notion of divinity had been merely an abstract or intellectual one, it would have made them neither better nor worse.
But when their notion of divinity was an immoral one, it could not do otherwise than render them immoral.
The vices of Roman Imperialism are the legitimate fruit of the worship of Roman paganism; where a man's treasure is there his heart will be.
Nor has the Christian conception of the Divine been at all times free from the same reproach.
The Christ of Medizevalism was too often but a pagan deity under a Christian name— a terrible figure in the air, brandishing the flaming sword of Judgment, and evoking vengeance upon the head of His enemies.
And wherever in the Medizeval world that conception of the Christ prevailed, the hearts of men were proportionately hardened.
It created the atrocities of the Crusades, it gave rise to the horrors of the Inquisition.
Ifthe God of Medizevalism had been but an intellectual abstraction, His influence would have been harmless.
But when the God of Medisevalism was conceived as a despot in the sky, His influence became pernicious.
Men received a bias in favour of despotism. They came to admire crushing power because it was crushing.
They grew callous to the call of merey and deaf to the voice of pity.
The tenderness of the humanity within them would have
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been utterly suppressed if the influence of the God of heaven had not been counteracted on earth by the reverence for the memory of the human Child, and the softening devotion to the virgin mother.
Now, let us suppose that the conception of Christ had been of an opposite nature.
Let us imagine that the medizeval conception of Divinity had itself been that ideal assigned to the virgin mother.
Conceive that, instead of a stern unbending soverelon wrapt up in the consciousness of his own majesty, and valuing beyond all things the material strength of his own dominion, the eye of the medizvalist had rested habitually on the form of a high priest in heaven, on the figure of a Divine
Being whose Divinity lay in his sacrificial power, and the rod of whose empire was the sceptre of love—apart altogether from dogmatic considerations, is it possible to imagine a more salutary influence than such a conception would have exerted?
It would have gone far to make the world of the middle ages in every sense the opposite of what it has actually been.
Presenting a new object of worship, a new standard of the Divine, it would steadily and surely have conformed to that standard the lives and thoughts of men.
Nay, that which a man worships is already in possession of his thoughts; it is only the life that needs to be conformed, and where the heart is the life shall soon be.
If the medieval world had assigned to its ideal of God in heaven a portion of that feminine fore.
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helpfulness which is found in the Virgin on earth, its ideal of priesthood would have been transformed from a conception of Papal power into a conception of ministering service.
Now, what we have here said hypothetically is in the New Testament exhibited actually.
If we ask why it is that the New Testament requires faith we shall find the answer to be, that what the New
Testament calls faith is itself a moral aspiration.
The New Testament is quite well aware of the distinction between an intellectual and a moral assent, as the narrative of Nicodemus clearly shows.
Nicodemus has all the faith of the most orthodox Scholastic; he has not only determined the measure of Christ's greatness, but he is able to give a reason
~ for his belief.
Yet this man, so correct in his theological convictions, is declared not to have even seen the kingdom of God.
He is told that before he can see the form of God's kingdom he requires to be in possession of its spirit.From such a statement there can be but one inference, viz, that the faith which Christianity demands is not so much a persuasion of the intellect as an aspiration of the soul.
To see the kingdom of God is to be already in possession of that kingdom, for it is only seen by that spiritual similarity which enables kindred minds to recognise each other's power.
If then it be asked, why is faith in Christ regarded by the New Testament as a valuable thing? the answer is not hard to find.
If Christ
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had been introduced into the world as a mere abstraction, or if He had demanded faith from man as a condition of revealing His character, the belief in Him would then have been a merely intellectual act, and could in no way have possessed a moral significance.
But the case is entirely altered when, before demanding anything at all, Christ reveals the nature of His mind.
He does not ask faith in Himself until He has shown Himself—'" Believe Me for the work's sake."
His first attitude is not one of receiving but of giving: He begins by manifesting His purity.
The faith which He requires is a faith in this manifestation.
To believe in Christ is a sign of moral goodness, because it is a belief in moral purity.
It is the soul's assent to the beauty of holiness, it is the spirit's admiration of the loveliness of a stainless life.
When a man looks at a portrait of moral perfection, and says, 'I believe in that," he is already in participation of that which he admires.
He could not admire it unless it were in him.
If it were a mere physical gift it would be very different.
A man may love to gaze on outward beauty though he himself be outwardly deformed.
But he cannot admire spiritual beauty if he be altogether spiritually deformed; to say so is a contradiction in terms.
The admiration of spiritual beauty is itself a feature of that beauty ; it implies an adaptation between the seer and the thing which he sees.
As surely as the love of poetry proves the presence of a poetic soul even in
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him who has hitherto been mute, as certainly as the interest in a metaphysical problem shows the existence of a philosophic faculty even in a practical mind, so surely does the admiration for virtue show that he who admires is in germ already virtuous.
That admiration is expressed in Christianity by the word faith.
When a man said, I believe in Christ, he really said, and meant to say, I believe in the beauty of goodness, in the desirableness of purity, in the right of righteousness to be ultimately triumphant.
He declared that Christ was his ideal of perfection, that to that ideal he was in thought at least loyal and true, and that he longed for the time to come when the actions of his life would be conformable to the thought of his soul.
And this leads us naturally to consider that problem which has always been specially associated with the subject of faith—the connection between the thought and the life.
When it has been decided that Christian faith is itself a moral impulse, it still remains to ask, what is the relation of this impulse to the outward lives of men?
To ask this is really to revive that crucial question of the First Christian century: Is a man justified by works or by faith only?
For us indeed that question can have only an ethical significance; with its theological aspect we have here nothing to do.
We believe, however, that as all widely accepted dogma has its root in some fact of human nature, the theological dogma of Justification can be illustrated by
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the moral nature of man.
Nay, we shall go further.
We say that Paul's theological conception of faith is directly built upon the moral aspiration described in the previous paragraph.
By faith in Christ, Paul means union with Christ.
Now in every moral aspiration, by which one mind seeks to rise to the level of another mind, such an union is impled.
The moment I have admired the spiritual beauty of another soul I am already in union with that soul.
My aspiration towards him is only possible to me on account of the oneness of our minds.
I cannot seek any spiritual good which I have not already begun to find.
If I say, I believe in the name, z.e. in the character, of the Lord Jesus Christ, I only do so, I only can do so, by reason of a kindred spirit; I believe in Him through that which is common to Him and me—' Blessed art thou, Simon Bar-Jona, for flesh and blood have not revealed it unto thee, but My Father in heaven !"
The theological conception of faith being then not at variance with the moral one; but, on the contrary, the necessary inference and corollary from it, it remains to ask whether the theological effect attributed to faith be in any sense analogous to its moral effect in the actual world?
Is there any moral sense in which it can be said that a man is justified by faith without the deeds of the law?
There is; and it is one of the deepest experiences of the moral consciousness.
It may be said with perfect truth that the measure of a man is, not what he
I1O
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can do, but what he believes in.
In every case the spiritual belief of a man outruns his actual capacity.
We often point with sadness to the amount of hypocrisy that exists in the world.
We hear men in their books and conversation giving utterance to the most pious and edifying sentiments, but when we meet them in the contact of life we experience a shock of contradiction.
Yet there is no necessity to suppose that the contradiction has its root in hypocrisy.
In a large number of cases it would be more correct to say that these men are "justified by faith."
They have the sight of an 7deal—the true definition of Christian faith.
They see before them an image of what they would like to be.
They have faith in it, that is to say, they believe it to be the only object worth following, and the only object which it will reward them to follow.
But just as the natural eye can see further than the steps can travel, so the moral sight of these men penetrates to a distance which transcends their capacity for moral walking.
They see like Balaam the Star that comes out of Judah, but while it speaks to their eye it lies beyond the reach of their feet.
They have sight of the ideal, but their footsteps lag behind their sight.
The new vision does not at once dispel the old nature any more than the morning sun at once dispels by its rising the clouds and shadows which the night has left behind.
The charge\of inconsistency would be much more easily substantiated than that of hypocrisy ; only it is, at
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Tit the outset, an inevitable inconsistency, an inconsistency which springs from the constitution of human nature itself.
It springs from the fact that the nature of man does not advance simultaneously to perfection, that there are powers of the human soul which seem to outrun the others and arrive more quickly at their destined goal.
It arises from that law of moral growth by which, while it is yet winter in the world of action, the aspirations are bursting into the buds of spring, and while the limbs are yet paralysed with cold the heart is made aware that the time for the singing of birds is come.
We ask, then, as St. Paul asked, what is to be our measure of the man?
Shall it be his works or his faith, his actual righteousness or his ideal righteousness?
Two opposite solutions of the problem have been proposed.
'The first is that of the Jew.
He decides in favour of works as the measure of a man.
He proposes to estimate the moral power of a human being by that which at any given time he is able todo.
But it is a law of the moral life that the more a man can do the more he feels his own impotence.
His ideal seems to fly further from his sight just in proportion as his acts conform to it.
Hence it was that the Jew of all men had a peculiar sense of moral unrest.
'The very effort to keep the law made him feel the impossibility of keeping it; his legal self-measurement ended in despair.
But here the Christian stepped in with another and a very different solution.
WAZ
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said to the Jew, what if your sense of impossibility be itself the mark and sign of your moral progress ¢
Are you not altogether on the wrong track to find an inward source of justification?
You think that you are less justified in proportion as the law appears to you too grand to be realised ; it is the reverse that is true.
It is only when the contrast appears between your moral ideal and your actual self that you are really on the road to justification.
It is only when your heart feels itself in the presence of a righteousness, before which the deeds of its actual life seem poor and mean, that it truly enters into the hope of a moral and spiritual regeneration ; it reaches nearest to perfection precisely at those points in which its distance from perfection is most vividly realised.
Now, between the claims of these two solutions there can be no difficulty to decide.
That of Christianity is clearly the one which is most in harmony with human nature.
As a matter of fact, no great work ever comes up to the greatness of its ideal.
We may take it for granted that the Paradise Lost, as it appears in print, is not nearly so grand a creation as the Paradise Lost when it existed in the brain of Milton.
We may consider it certain that the imitative acts of the child are of less value than the principle of imitation which prompted them.
We may look upon it as beyond dispute that the spirit of religion which underlies any form of worship is of more importance than
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that form or all other forms put together.
What do these facts mean but this, that the main value of a deed lies in what it does not say, that the thing which makes it good and gives it value is not what it says but what it suggests of power beyond its own!
It is true alike of the intellectual and of the moral hero, that the only sense of satisfaction he can experience in the completion of any actual work is just that sense of dissatisfaction which tells him he is beyond his work; he is justified by the sight of his ideal—by faith.
We have now vindicated the claim of Christian faith to a commanding place in the moral world; we have done so on the ground of a particular definition which we have assigned to that faith, We have defined it to be the sight of an ideal.
We have to add, that if this definition be accepted it will go far to minimise, nay, to reduce into a unity, those seemingly various meanings which the word bears in the New Testament.
It is often pointed out by theologians that the term faith is used in Scripture to denote different things.
Sometimes it is the opposite of physical perception—" We walk by faith, not by sight."
Sometimes it is the opposite of outward works—"
By the deeds of the law can no man be justified."
Sometimes it is a term that denotes a steadfast loyalty preserved in the midst of surrounding difficulties, the opposite of a wavering mind—"Thy faith hath made thee whole."
Now, while in these senses of the word faith there H
pled:
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is admittedly a shade of difference, there is in our view a common root of agreement.
Is there any similarity of meaning which belongs to the word in each of these senses?
Thereis; the idea of outward incompleteness.
When it is said that faith, and not sight, is the principle of a Christian's life, what does that mean?
Is it not clearly this, that he believes in something which is not yet outwardly realised 2 When it is said that we are not justified by the deeds of the law, what is that but to say that we cannot realise our ideal of purity?
When it is said, '' Be thou faithful unto death, and I will give thee a crown of life,'—is not this but in other words to declare, that the highest of all trust is that which can believe in a promise which has lost all prospect of being realised on earth?
In each and all of these cases faith has one and the same meaning.
It is the sight of an ideal whose outward manifestation is not yet seen, the conviction of a truth whose proof lies beyond the eye and ear, the assurance of a result whose accomplishment seems belied by the actual facts of life.
There is still another sense of the word faith in the New Testament, in which it no longer represents a personal act, but stands for a body of collective doctrine, it is that, sense in which Paul says to Timothy : " Hold fast the old faith once delivered to the saints."
Yet even here it may be said with truth that the dogmas of the early Church were but the crystallisations of her ideals.
Whatever the
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I15 dogmas of Christianity may have become in the hands of the medizval world, there can at least be no doubt that with the Church of primitive Christendom they were but the embodiment of the heart's moral longings.
To that Church the value of the dogma was the moral element to which it gave expression.
It was good to believe in a divine Christ, because divinity was then something more than power; it was power working by love.
It was good to believe in a Trinity, because trinity was then something more than dogma; it was grace, love, and communion.
It was good to believe in heaven, because heaven was then something more than a place where men received physical rewards for duty done; it was a Temple in which men served God day and night.
It was good to believe in atonement, because atonement was then not the mere means of a salvation from physical fire, but a mode of reconciliation between the ideal law of conscience and the actual life of man.
We do not say, as an eminent Iinglish divine has tried to show, that the dogmas of Christianity were essential to the ethics of Christianity.*
We neither affirm nor deny that; it lies outside of our province.
But we do say, that the doctrines which to the medizvalist were precious on account of their intellectual mystery were prized by the early Church in view of their moral intelligibility.
Whether to that primitive Christian * Wace, Christianity and Morality—Boyle Lecture for 1878.
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consciousness dogma was or was not deemed essential to morality may be left an open question, but there can be no question at all that morality was deemed essential to dogma.
In the primitive gospel religion and morality were two halves of one whole—the Christian religion was the theory of Christian morals; Christian morality was the practice of the Christian religion.
The word doctrine had always a practical sense; it meant something by which to live.
Alike to Paul and to James, faith without works was dead, because faith was itself but a vision anticipative of the work completed.
It was but the recognition -by the inner eye of that which the outer eye could not see, and the realising already of that purity to reach which the actual life has still to travel far.
The object of a man's faith was nothing less than the goal of his aspiration, the treasure which he sought and prayed for.
Here we are brought 'to the gates of a new subject, to a phase of the Christian life much misunderstood and often misrepresented—the connection which subsists in Gospel morality between the value of a man's faith and the value of his prayer.
A subject of such great moral significance, and one so distinctive of the ethics of Christian belief demands subjection to a separate study.