The same men have preached the same doctrine to persons whom it was impossible for them to convince by the use of reasoning, by an appeal to examination, or to science, to women and crowds of persons incapable alike of laborious study and of lengthened reflection. They spoke to the imagination, to the moral affections, where the persons whom they addressed were prone to feel emotion, and to believe in consequence of emotion. They gave the name of Faith to the result of their action, just as they had done so to the result of the process essentially intellectual of which I was before speaking. Faith thus instilled was a religious conviction, not acquired by reasoning, and deriving its origin in human sensibility. This is the idea of faith as entertained by the Mystic Sects.
Appeals to human sensibility and human emotion have not always sufficed to generate faith. Another spring of human influence has been resorted to; and men have been commanded to adhere to practices and to form habits. Man must sooner or later attach ideas to the acts which are habitual to him, and attribute a meaning to that which produces in him a constant effect. The mind was led to the belief of the principles which had given birth to certain practices and habits. A new kind of faith appeared, it had for its principle and dominant characteristic, the submission of the mind to an authority invested with the right at once to govern man's life and to regulate his thought.
Finally, faith has not everywhere nor constantly been generated in the human mind, either by the free exercise of the intelligence, or by appeals to sensibility, or by the formation of habits. It was then said that faith was incommunicable, that it was not in man's power to impart faith, or to acquire it by any exertion of his own, that for this purpose God's intervention and the action of his grace were necessary. Divine grace became thus the preliminary condition of faith and its definitive character.
The word faith has, consequently, in turn expressed: 1st, a conviction acquired by the free efforts of the human intelligence; 2ndly, a conviction acquired by way of the sensibility, and without the concurrence of the reason, and often even against its authority; 3rdly, a conviction acquired by man's long submission to a power invested with a power from on high to command conviction; 4thly, a conviction induced by supernatural means,—by divine grace.
What in the midst of this variety of sources from which it may emanate is the essential and invariable character of faith? What is the state of the soul in which faith reigns when we consider it independently of its origin and of its object?
Two kinds of belief exist in man: the one, I will not call it innate, for this is an inexact and justly criticised expression, but a belief natural and spontaneous which springs up and establishes itself in the mind of man, if not without his being aware of it, at least without the help of any reflection or volition on his part, by the development alone of his nature and the influence of that external world in the midst of which his life is passed; the other kind of belief is the result of laborious examination and reflection, the fruit of voluntary study and of the power possessed by man either to concentrate all his faculties upon a certain object with the design of mastering it, or to direct the thought inwards, and realise what is there taking place—to render an account thereof to himself, and thus to acquire by an act of volition and of reflection, a knowledge which he did not before possess, although the facts which form its object nevertheless existed as facts external—and which he might see by his eyes,—or as facts which were taking place within him.
Of these two kinds of belief which merits the name of faith?