To me it requires greater faith to call the Christian experience an illusion than to accept its reality and validity.
The true poet is the living embodiment of instinctive faith. His mind and heart are keenly alive to God’s revelation of Himself in man and nature. He is a seer. His themes are the truths that come to him in visions from the realms of truth. He sees the principle of beauty in things; and familiar scenes, commonplace experiences are clothed in a spiritual glory. He accepts the world of facts and of science, but gives them their real meaning. Poetic insight, a thing so much contemned, because so little understood, is one of the best illustrations and evidences of the nature of faith. Wordsworth calls poetry “the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge.”
A few months ago I chanced to be looking from a railroad train near Lake Erie in the very early dawn. I beheld, as I supposed, a beautiful expanse of water, with islands and inlets, and, beyond, a range of blue hills. I was lost in admiration of the view. As the light increased, a suspicion, at last growing into certainty, arose that I was the subject of an illusion, and that my beautiful landscape was but a changing scene of cloud and open sky on the horizon. But the blue hills still seemed real; soon they, too, were resolved into clouds, and only a common wooded country remained to the vision. The analogy to the dawn of civilization and the flight of superstition, and, finally, of faith, forced itself upon me, and I was troubled, seeing no escape from the application. Just then the sun arose, bringing the glory of light to the eye, and with it came a thrilling mental flash. There was the solution, the all-revealing light, the greater truth, without which neither the appearance of the solid earth nor of its seeming aërial counterpart would have been possible. Both evidenced the greater existence. Are not our fancies and our facts, our errors in the search of truth and our truths, our doubts and our faith, our life and activity and being, proofs of a Universal Existence—the revealer of truth, the source of truth, and the Truth?
This address has more than a formal purpose. Our beliefs in great measure determine our practical life. Freedom, God, and Immortality are conceptions that have ruled in the affairs of men and made the best products of civilization; they must still rule in the individual, if he would grow to his full stature. We are in a century of doubt, but I firmly believe that in the ashes of the old faith the vital spark still glows, and that from them, phœnix-like, will rise again the spiritual life in new strength and beauty.
Show your faith by your works; faith without works is dead. A mere philosophic belief in abstract ideals, not lived in some measure, may be worse than useless. A mere intellectual faith that does not touch the heart and brighten life and make work a blessing lacks the vital element. Follow your ideals closely with effort. Give life breadth as well as length; the totality will be the sum of your thought, feeling, and action. When the active conflict is over and the heroes recount their battles, may you be able to say: “I, too, was there.”
There is still a practical side. Many young men have powers of growth and possibilities of success beyond their present belief; faith creates results. Every one has rare insights and rare impulses, showing his powers and urging him to action; it is fatal to ignore them. Faith is needed in business; confidence begets confidence. It is needed in social life; friendship demands to be met on equal terms. It is a ground of happiness; suspicion creates gloom and pessimism. It is needed for practical coöperation; suspicion is isolated. It is needed by the educator; faith and love make zeal in the calling. It is due even the criminal; in most men there is more of good than bad. Charity for the sins and misfortunes of humanity, hope for the best, faith in our endeavor must attend successful effort to aid men.
After all it is the essential spirit that one cultivates within him that will determine his manifold deeds. We can invoke no greater blessing than a character that in all ways will assert the highest dignity that belongs to a human soul. Be brave in your faith. When materialism, indifference, doubt, ease, and unseemly pleasure claim you for theirs (the Devil’s own), let your answer be what is expressed in Carlyle’s “Everlasting Yea”: “And then was it that my whole Me stood up, in native God-created majesty, and with emphasis recorded its Protest: I am not thine, but Free!”
When I see some grand old man, full of faith, courage, optimism, and cheerfulness, whose life has conformed to the moral law, who has wielded the right arm of his freedom boldly for every good cause, come to the end of life with love for man and trust in God, seeing the way brighten before him, turning his sunset into morning, I must believe that he represents the survival of the fittest, that his ideals are not the mere fictions of a blind nature, serving for the preservation of his physical being, but that the order of his life has been in accord with realities.