Lux Mundi: A Series of Studies in the Religion of the Incarnation, / 10th Edition, 1890

by Unknown

Faith, then, is an instinct of relationship based on an inner actual fact. And its entire office and use lies in realising the secret fact. For the bond is spiritual; and it can only realise itself in a spirit that has become aware of its own laws. No blind animal acceptance of the divine assistance can draw out the powers of this sonship. The reception of the assistance must itself be conscious, loving, intelligent, willing. The natural world can receive its full capacities from God without recognition of the source whence they flow in: but this absence of living recognition forbids it ever to surpass those fixed limits of development which we name 'natural.' But a creature of God that could not only receive but recognise that it received, would, by that very recognition, lay itself open to an entirely novel development; it would be susceptible of infinitely higher influences shed down upon it from God; it would admit far finer and richer inpourings of divine succours; it would be fed, not only from underground channels as it were, but by fresh inlets which its consciousness of its adherence in God would uncover and set in motion. The action of God upon His creatures would be raised to a new level of possibility: for a living and intelligent will has capacities of receptivity, which were altogether excluded so long as God merely gave, and the creature blindly and dumbly took. Faith, then, opens an entirely new career for creaturely existence; and the novelty of this career is expressed in the word 'supernatural.' The 'supernatural' world opens upon us as soon as faith is in being[55].

And this career, it will be seen, is markedly distinct from the natural in this—that it is capable of ever advancing expansion. All natural things, which blindly accept their life from God, must, perforce, have a decreed and certified development, limited by the conditions in which they are found existing. Their receptivity is a fixed quantity, determined by the character imposed upon them at creation, and bound to come to an abrupt arrest at some precise point[56]. But receptivity through conscious recognition is open to a development of which it is impossible for us to fix the limits. For this living recognition itself advances in its capacity to see and understand. Every act by which it recognises the Giver in the gifts, heightens and intensifies its power to recognise Him; and every increase of its power to recognise Him increases also its capacity to receive; and this increase will again react on the faculties of recognition. A vision opens out of spiritual growth, in which every step forward made through incoming grace, makes a new step possible, finds a fresh grace ever waiting to crown its latest gift with ever new endowment. The sonship that is at work underground in man, below the level of consciousness, at the hidden base of faith, is one that holds in it capacities which can only be evoked under the appeals of a living and voluntary faith. Faith is the discovery of an inherent sonship, which, though already sealed to it, already in action, nevertheless cannot but withhold its more rich and splendid energies until this discovery is made; and which discloses them only according to the progressive clearness and force with which the process of discovery advances. The history of faith is the history of this gradual disclosure, this growing capacity to recognise and receive, until the rudimentary omen of God's fatherhood in the rudest savage who draws, by clumsy fetich, or weird incantation, upon a power outside himself, closes its long story in the absolute recognition, the perfect and entire receptivity, of that Son of man, who can do nothing of Himself, 'but what He seeth the Father do,' and, for that very reason, can do everything: for whatsoever 'the Father doeth, the Son doeth also.'

Faith, then, is not only the recognition by man of the secret source of his being, but it is itself, also, the condition under which the powers, that issue from that source, make their arrival within him. The sonship, already germinal, completes itself, realises itself in man, through his faith. Not only is the unconscious human nature held by attachment to the Father who feeds it with hidden succours, but faith is, itself, the power by which the conscious life attaches itself to God; it is an apprehensive motion of the living spirit, by which it intensifies its touch on God; it is an instinct of surrender, by which it gives itself to the fuller handling of God: it is an affection of the will, by which it presses up against God, and drinks in divine vitality with quickened receptivity[57].

What then will be its characteristics? We have only to keep close to the conception of sonship, and we shall understand them well enough. Faith is the attitude, the temper, of a son towards a father. That is a relationship that we all can understand for ourselves. We know it, in spite of all the base and cruel corruptions under which, in the homes of man, its beauty lies disfigured. Still, beneath disguises, we catch sight, in rare and happy conditions, of that beautiful intimacy which can spring up between a son and a father, where love is one with reverence, and duty fulfils itself in joy. Such a sonship is like a spiritual instinct, which renders intelligible to the son every mood and gesture of the father. His very blood moves in rhythm to the father's motives. His soul hangs, for guidance, on the father's eyes: to him, each motive of the father justifies itself as a satisfying inspiration. The father's will is felt deliciously encompassing him about; enclosed within it, his own will works, glad and free in its fortifying obedience. Such a relationship as this needs no justifying sanction beyond itself: it is its own sanction, its own authority, its own justification. 'He is my father': that is a sufficient reason for all this sympathetic response to another's desire. 'I am his son': that is the final premiss in which all argument comes to a close. The willing surrender of the heart is the witness to a fact which is beyond argument, which accepts no denial, yet which is no tyrannous fate, but is a living and animating bond of blood, which it is a joy to recognise, and an inspiration to confess.

It is in such a spirit of sonship that faith reveals and realises itself. Faith is that temper of sympathetic and immediate response to Another's will which belongs to a recognised relationship of vital communion. It is the spirit of confident surrender, which can only be justified by an inner identification of life. Its primary note, therefore, will be trust—that trust of Another, which needs no ulterior grounds on which to base itself, beyond what is involved in the inherent law of this life. Faith will ever discover, when its reason for action, or belief, are traced to their last source, that it arrives at a point where its only and all-sufficient plea will be 'God is my Father: I am His child.' That relationship is its root; on the top of that relationship faith works; as a witness to that relationship, it puts forth all the spiritual temper which, of necessity, follows on this intimacy of contact.

And, here, we find ourselves in the presence of the law by which faith claims to be universal. Unless this inner relationship be a fact, faith could not account for itself: but if it be a fact, it must constitute a fixed and necessary demand upon all men. All are, equally, 'children of God': and the answer to the question 'Why should I believe?' must be, for ever and for all, valid; 'because you are a child of God.' Faith is nothing but the spiritual temper and attitude, which belong, inherently, to such a fact. No one can escape from such a claim: for his existence constitutes the claim. If he be a child, it must be demanded, of him, that he should display the characteristics of his childhood: the father must, of necessity, be concerned with the question of his own recognition by his son. Our manhood lies in this essential sonship: and, if so, then to be without faith, without the conscious realisation of the sonship, is to be without the fulness of a man's proper nature. It is to be inhuman: to be curtailed of the natural development: to be maimed and thwarted. It means that the vital outcome of the inner verity has been arrested; that the sensitive perceptions have been blunted and stunted; that the sonship in us has, somehow, lost touch with its true fatherhood.

We learn at once, as we consider this, the interpretation of that two-sided character, which surprises us in God's dealings with men:—i.e. the imperative rigour of His stated requirements, coupled with His wide and patient tolerance, in actual fact.

As a Father of all, He cannot, conceivably, be satisfied with anything short of complete recognition by His children. He must look for faith; He must require it of them all: He must leave no means untried by which to secure it: He must seek to win it at all costs: His love is inevitably and cruelly hindered, unless He can obtain it: and when He obtains it, He must passionately desire to establish, evoke, develope, perfect it: for each rise in faith is a rise in capacities of intercourse, of intimacy, between Father and son. We see how strenuous and zealous will be His efforts to build up faith in men: we understand how urgent, and pressing, and alarming will become His entreaties, His warnings, His menaces, His appeals, if faith is allowed to slide or fail. Loss of faith means a shattered home, a ruptured intimacy, a sundered love; it means that a Father must look on while the very nature He has made in His image shrivels and shrinks, and all hope of growth, of advancing familiarity, of increasing joy, of assured sympathy, is cut down and blighted. We all know the bitterness of a breach which scatters a family into fragments: and that is but a faint shadow of all which the great Father sees to be involved in the broken contact between Himself and His son. What standard have we by which to sound the abyss of divine disappointment, as God waits ready with gift upon gift of endless grace which He will pour out upon the child of His love, as the endless years open out new wonders of advancing intimacy; and lo! the channel by which alone the gifts can reach him, is choked and closed? Faith is the son's receptivity: it is that temper of trust, which makes the entry of succours possible: it is the medium of response: it is the attitude of adherence to the Father, by virtue of which communications can pass. If faith goes, all further action of God upon the soul, all fresh arrival of power, is made impossible. The channel of intercourse is blocked.

The demand, then, for faith by God is bound to be exacting, and urgent, and universal. But, then, this demand holds in reserve a ground of hope, of patience, of tolerance, of charity, which we can, in no single instance, venture to limit. For the faith, which it rigorously asks for, reposes, as we see, on an inner and essential relationship, already existent, which knits man to his God. Not even the Fall, with all its consequent accumulations of sin, can avail to wholly undo this primitive condition of existence. The fatherhood of God still sustains its erring children; the divine image is blurred, but not blotted out. Still, at the close of the long days, our Lord can speak to the wondering men who flock about Him, of One Who is even now their Father in Heaven. This objective and imperishable relationship, the underlying ground of all our being, is the pre-supposition of all faith, without which it would itself be impossible. And, this being so, God can afford to wait very long for faith to show itself. So long as its primary condition is there, there is always hope. The stringent demand is not inspired by the mind of a lawgiver, nor pressed home with the austerity of a judge; it expresses the hunger of a father's heart, to win the confidence and to evoke the capacities of the children of its love. Such a hunger is, indeed, more rigorous and exact than the letter of any law: it aspires after a more accurate correspondence; it is sensitive to more delicate distinctions: but, nevertheless, it holds, in its fatherliness, far wider capacities of toleration than lawgiver, or judge. That same heart of the father, which in its hunger of love is so exacting, will, out of the same hunger, never despair, and never forsake: it will never cease from the pursuit of that responsive trust which it desires; it will make allowances, it will permit delays, it will weave excuses, it will endure rebuffs, it will condescend to persuasion, it will forget all provocations, it will wait, it will plead, it will repeat its pleas, it will take no refusal, it will overleap all obstacles, it will run risks, it will endlessly and untiringly forgive, if only, at the last, the stubborn child-heart yield, and the tender response of faith be won.

Here, then, we seem to see why the nature of faith allows for two points which surprise us in God's dealings, as if with a contradiction. On the one hand, we hear Him, though prophet and priest, insisting, with severe precision, on the necessity of a right and accurate faith. On the other, we cannot but recognise, in the open area of actual life, the evidences of a wide and almost boundless toleration. Again and again it must have seemed to us that the Church and the world gave, thus, antithetical evidence of God's character. Yet, in truth, both speak the voice of one and the same God, Who, in His undivided love, both passionately seeks for the delicate and direct response of an accurate faith; and, also, in order not to lose this final joy, 'suffereth long, and is kind, beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things.' Yes!—has even to endure that men should pit His toleration against His love, and should argue that, because He will wait so long and quietly for the fruit that He desires to reap, therefore, He does not desire the fruit. In reality, the degree of the toleration, with which God will patiently wait for the fruits of faith, is the measure of the extremity of His desire for it. Just because He wants it so much, He waits so long.