Or, after all your boasting about scientific and demonstrative certainty, have you been obliged to receive the certainties of science "upon faith, and at second-hand, and upon the word of another;" and to save your life you could not tell half the time who that other is, by naming the discoverers of half the scientific truths you believe? What! are you dependent on hearsay, and probability, for any little science you possess, having in fact never obtained any personal demonstration or experience of its first principles and measurements, nor being capable of doing so? Then let us hear no more cant about the uncertainty of a religion dependent upon testimony, and the certainties of experimental science. Whatever certainty may be attainable by scientific men—and we have seen that is not much—it is very certain you have got none of it. The very best you can have to wrap yourself in is a second-hand assurance, grievously torn by rival schools, and needing to be patched every month by later discoveries. Your science, such as it is, rests solely upon faith in the testimony of philosophers, often contradictory and improbable, and always fallible and uncertain.
5. Nor would you cease to be dependent upon faith could you personally make all the observations and calculations of demonstrative science. The knowledge of these facts does not constitute science; it is merely the brick pile containing the materials for the building of science. Science is knowledge systematized. But if the parts of nature were not arranged after a plan, the knowledge of them could not be formed into a system. Chaos is unintelligible. Our minds are so constituted that we look for order and regularity, and can not comprehend confusion. We possess this expectation of order before we begin to learn science, and without it would never begin the search after a system of knowledge. All scientific experiment is but a search after order, and order is only another name for intelligence—for God. Deprive us of this fundamental faith in cause and effect, order and regularity—of reason, in short—and science becomes as impossible to man as to the orang-outang. All science, even in its first principles, rests upon faith.
Not only science, reason, also, is founded upon faith; for we can not prove by reason the truths which form the data of reasoning. The intuitions of the mind, which form the postulates necessary to the first process of reasoning, are believed, not proven. When the wise fool attempted to prove his own existence by the celebrated sophism, "I think, therefore I exist," he necessarily postulated his existence in order to prove it. How did he know that there was an "I" to think? And how did he know that the "I" thought? Certainly not by any process of reasoning, but by faith. He believed these truths; but could never reason them into his consciousness. Faith, then, underlies reason itself.
We may now proceed to inquire whether or not faith, which we have found so prevalent even among those who repudiate it, is a thing to be ashamed of; or if it be a sufficiently certain and reliable basis for human life and conduct.
1. We are met at the very outset by the great fact that God has so constituted the world and everything in it, that in all the great concerns of life we are necessitated to depend on faith; without any possibility of reaching absolute certainty regarding the result of any ordinary duty. We sow without any certainty of a crop, or that we may live to reap it. We harvest, but our barns may be burned down. We sell our property for bank-bills, but who dare say they will ever be paid in specie? We start on a journey to a distant city, but even though you insure your life, who will insure that fire, or flood, or railroad collision may not send you to the land whence there is no return?
Science is the child of yesterday; but from the beginning of the world men have lived by faith. Before science was born, Cain tilled his ground without any mathematical demonstration that he should reap a crop. Abel fed his flock without any scientific certainty that he should live to enjoy its produce; and Tubal Cain forged axes and swords without any assurance that he should not be plundered of his wages. All the experience of mankind proves that experimental certainty regarding the most important business of this life is impossible. By what process of philosophical induction is religion alone put beyond the sphere of faith and hope? If religious duties are not binding on us, unless religion be scientifically demonstrated, then neither are moral obligations; for these two can not be separated. Is it really so, that none but scientific men are bound to tell the truth, and pay their debts; and that a person may not fear God, and go to heaven, unless he has graduated at college? The common sense of mankind declares that we live by faith, not by science.
2. We demand the knowledge of truths of which science is profoundly ignorant. Science is but an outlying nook of my farm, which I may neglect and yet have bread to eat. Faith is my house in which all my dearest interests are treasured. Of all the great problems and precious interests which belong to me as a mortal and an immortal, science knows nothing. I ask her whence I came? and she points to her pinions scorched over the abyss of primeval fire, her eyes blinded by its awful glare, and remains silent. I inquire what I am? but the strange and questioning I is a mystery which she can neither analyze nor measure. I tell her of the voice of conscience within me—she never heard it, and does not pretend to understand its oracles. I tell her of my anxieties about the future—she is learned only in the past. I inquire how I may be happy hereafter—but happiness is not a scientific term, and she can not tell me how to be happy here! Poor, blind science!
3. All our dearest interests lie beyond the domains of science, in the regions of faith. Science treats of things—faith is confidence in persons. Take away the persons, and of what value are the things? The world becomes at once a vast desert, a dreary solitude, and more miserable than any of its former inhabitants the lonely wretch who is left to mourn over the graves of all his former companions—the last man. Solitary science were awful. Could I prosecute the toils of study alone, without companion or friend to share my labors? Would I study eternally with no object, and for no use; none to be benefited, none to be gratified by my discoveries? Though you hung maps on every tree, made every mountain range a museum, bored mines in every valley, and covered every plain with specimens, made Vesuvius my crucible, and opened the foundations of the earth to my view—yet would the discovery of a single fresh human footprint in the sand fill my heart with more true hope of happiness, than an endless eternity of solitary science. I can live, and love, and be happy without science, but not without companionship, whose bond is faith.
Faith is the condition of all the happiness you can know on earth. Law, order, government, civilization, and family life, depend not upon science, but upon confidence in moral character—upon faith. In its sunshine alone can happiness grow. It is faith sends you out in the morning to your work, nerves your arms through the toils of the day, brings you home in the evening, gathers your wife and your children around your table, inspires the oft-repeated efforts of the little prattler to ascend your knee, clasps his chubby arms around your neck, looks with most confiding innocence in your eye, and puts forth his little hand to catch your bread, and share your cup. Undoubting faith is happiness even here below. Need you marvel, then, that you must be converted from your pride of empty, barren science, and casting yourself with all your powers into the arms of faith, become as a little child before you can enter into the kingdom of heaven?