You cannot tell much about a man's faith by his willingness to deal in futures without any foundation in fact. And yet no man is ready to face the future unless his heart is nerved by a high and worthy faith. This alone can give strength to look down the coming days and to take up their tasks.
None of us can know what these new days hold for us; fear readily conjures up pictures of disaster. But because of certain sublime confidences we hold we banish our fears, shake off our sloth, and gladly step out into the unknown and untrodden country of to-morrow.
Faith is the force of all the ages. It accounts for the past; it enters and determines the future. Because certain men in days gone by believed certain things intensely; because they were thrilled by great visions, by glorious ideals, history was wrought out in the forge of their convictions, under the hammer of their wills.
No great things are done except by the power of faith, under glowing hopes and compelling convictions. It is her faith in her boy's future that makes the mother willing to suffer, keeps her patient, that buoys up the father in the strife and weariness of life. No man or woman is doing anything that makes the world richer for mere bread and butter; some purpose and vision is behind the worthy work.
It is because somehow we believe, no matter how we may phrase the belief, that destiny is behind this strange weaving we call life that we are content to seem to be the shuttles jerked hither and thither. We bear the ills of to-day because we dimly see the glorious goal of the good of all. We do a full day's work only as we see somehow an eternal wage.
It makes little difference what creed a man may hold, for that has become almost wholly a matter of philosophical speculation regarding things unknown and often unimportant, but it makes all the difference what measure and quality of faith he has, whether he feels the force of great aspirations and is controlled by eternal principles.
It may belong to few of us to be heralded as heroes, and the judgment of history may confer on none the martyr's crown, but the hero's joy and the martyr's glory are in the heart of every one who boldly reaches up to and lives out the highest he conceives, for he will not do that without sacrifice and pain on his side nor without enriching for mankind on the other.
The largest faith may be manifest in the lowliest places. When all the work of the ages appears, when the weaving of the centuries is turned with its finished side towards us, we may see that the man who has laid the brick or fed the furnace or the woman who has washed and cooked in the home and tended the little ones, doing these things for love, has shot the most glowing colours into the great fabric.
It is not the thing you do so much as the spirit in which you do it that makes it great or small. Faith determines this spirit, for faith is that which fashions the ideal of the one we love, the ideal we serve and for which we joyfully suffer. The prophet whose burning words cannot forget lives by the faith in a vision broad and sweeping; but not less is the faith of the humble toiler who lives each day by the vision of his home and fireside.
Nor is this all. It is faith that draws on life's invisible sources of power and refreshing; it is faith that finds inner contact with the invisible. How empty is life if it hold nothing but things; how hungry grows the heart fed only on cold facts. For each day as it comes we need to be able to draw on the deep springs of the water of life, the springs from which our fathers drank and found strength to lay the foundations of our day.