One circumstance which the Protestant theory forgets is that all knowledge of divine things is not necessarily faith. Angelic knowledge and that of the triumphant church is vision, not faith, and differs from faith either in essence or in inseparable accidents. The knowledge we have of God through natural theology, however true, is not, therefore, identical with divine faith. Irrespectively of Christianity, a belief in God precedes speculations, and comes to children chiefly by faith in what they hear from their parents. They could not, indeed, believe their parents equally if their own minds were not in harmony with such a belief; but in their case, too, authority is commonly a condition of believing. By faith, says S. Paul, “we know that the worlds were made.” That knowledge comes to us both through testimony and by intuitions. The “heavens declare the glory of God”; but they declare it, not prove it scientifically; and the Psalmist had the patriarchal tradition and Mosaic revelation, as well as his intuitions, and as their interpreter. Natural theology we accept by human faith concurring with natural lights and that lower degree of grace which compasses the whole world. Divine faith, S. Paul tells us, requires an outward organ, too, not for its promulgation only, but for its certainty. “He gave some apostles, some pastors, etc.,” “that we be not driven about with every wind of doctrine.” Could this effect have been realized if apostle had preached against apostle, and each prophet had said to his neighbor “I, too, am a prophet,” and bear an opposite message? S. Paul says that the hierarchy is ordained not only for edification, but to make faith certain. It can only do that in its unity. Had certainty been unnecessary, or had reason been its organ, no hierarchy would have been elevated to constitute the church representative.
The Protestant theory (it may be so spoken of with reference to the great main points included in most forms of Protestantism) assumes that the one great characteristic of faith is its being a power of “spiritual discernment” or an intuition of spiritual truth. This is to put a part of the truth in place of the whole. This attribute of faith is asserted by the church also; but her conception of faith is founded on a larger appreciation of the Holy Scriptures and of man's compound nature.
Faith indeed becomes a spiritual seeing; but it comes “by hearing.” Considered even exclusively as intuition, the “spiritual discernment” is wholly different in kind from moral or mathematical intuitions, as those two classes of intuition differ from each other. A spiritual intuition, analogous to that of reason (though more exalted), would be utterly unsuited to our needs while still laboring in our probation and toiling in the “body of this [pg 587] death.” The intuition really vouchsafed to us by supernatural grace ever retains peculiar characteristics originally produced by the mode in which we receive it. Humility, submission, self-abnegation, constitute that mode; and these qualities are and remain as essential characteristics of true faith as spiritual discernment is. No otherwise than “as little children” is it possible for us to enter into the kingdom of heaven. We must enter the sheep-fold by the door; we cannot otherwise profit by it; for could we climb its walls, it would cease to be the sheep-fold to us, since we should not bear in our breasts the heart of the Lamb. Opinion asserts; faith confesses. Assertion includes self-assertion; confession confesses another. God only can rightly assert himself. Created beings are relative beings, and the condition of their true greatness is that they forget themselves in God. The very essence of pride, the sin of the fallen angels, whom but a single voluntary evil thought subverted, is self-assertion on the part of a relative being. In taking self as a practical ground of knowledge, it, in a certain sense, creates its Creator, and involves the principle that God himself may be but an idea. Pride is not only our strongest spiritual temptation, but is almost the natural instinct of reason, working by itself, on supernatural themes, and it remains undetected by reason, just as water cannot be weighed in water. The higher we soar, the more we need to be reminded of our infirmity; therefore the glorious intuitions of faith are, for our safety, given to us by the way of humility, and continued to us on condition of obedience. Not only faith, as a habit, is humble, but the peculiar species of knowledge which it conveys is such as to preserve that character; for that knowledge is obscure, although certain. We see, “as through a glass, darkly”; but we see steadily. Imaginative reason gets bright flashes by rubbing its own eyes, but they are transient. Faith, requiring docility as a habit in us, and involving obscurity as a condition of its knowledge, is a perpetual discipline of self-sacrifice. Christianity is the doctrine of a sacrifice; and through a spiritual act and habit of self-sacrifice alone can that doctrine be “spiritually discerned.” Christian knowledge is thus the opposite of the rationalistic and of the Gnostic.
This estimate of faith is surely as Scriptural as it is philosophic. Thus only can we reconcile the statements of our Lord and of S. Paul. The most humble and child-like docility is constantly referred to by our Lord as an essential part of that faith which, on condition of so beginning and of continuing such, imparts to us as much spiritual discernment as is an earnest of the Blessed Vision. Such docility must look like credulity. Almost all the instances of it which met his highest praise did look like credulity, and would have been credulity had not grace inspired them, Providence directed them, and Truth itself rewarded them. What then? Which part of Christianity is not thus double-visaged? What part of it is not a scandal to them that “judge by appearances” and do not “judge righteous judgment”? If to all without faith the Master must seem an impostor, why should not the disciples seem enthusiasts? Were they who wished that the shadow of the apostles should fall on them, was she who touched the hem of Christ's garment, fanatics, because erring nature too can [pg 588] prompt her children to similar acts under an erring religion? Before such a philosophy (if philosophy can rest on such an assumption) the Gospel, as well as the church of the orbis terrarum, and the whole ancient church, must give way, and pure religion must be a discovery, not of the XVIth, but of the XIXth century. Credulity itself is but a subordinate and ill-grounded form of human faith, and is far from suppressing, though it misdirects, the nobler faculties of the natural man. Plato and Bacon had more of it than Epicurus and Hobbes. Docility (its analogon in the spiritual world) is the humbler element in faith. It is absolutely necessary, and is sometimes undistinguishable, in mere outward seeming, from its natural counterpart. Milk is as necessary for babes as meat for the mature. The mature never cease, in the kingdom of heaven, to be, inclusively, children; it is their very excellence that they unite the best characteristics of different ages, sexes, and conditions. Yet the children of the kingdom are not fed on mortal, but on immortal, milk; and that milk is meat in a less compact preparation. As an incredulous habit is not a mark of true wisdom, so an indocile habit is incompatible with an authentic faith, which cannot act except in obedience to an authentic authority. To the rationalist the indocile habit, far from being a fault, is a necessity; for his knowledge comes from within only, not from above and from within.
Now let us turn to history and fact. Had they no spiritual discernment of Christ who died for him? Yet did not the martyrs and the age of martyrs abound in what to Protestantism seem credulities? The church of the apostles, of the fathers, of the doctors, of the schoolmen, the church that built up Christendom, invariably recognized the principle of ecclesiastical obedience, docility, submission, as a part of faith, not as inconsistent with the intuition of faith—its moral element, as the other is its intellectual. It was the cement that kept the whole fabric together, though not the amphionic power that raised the living stones. Those who branded obedience as superstition were Arius, and Aërius, and Vigilantius, and the Albigensian heretics, not the fathers, the doctors, or the martyrs of the faith. The latter knew that the faith of him who lays hold of Christ, and of her who but touches “the hem of his garment,” are in kind the same. They knew also, that, when truth confronts us and grace is offered, the spirit which is “offended” at little things is not edified by great. And how has it been ever since; how is it now with the mass of the world? How does faith come to children and to the poor, and to the busy and to the dull? What makes the Bible divine to them? What suggests the truths which they are to look for in the Bible? Authority, everywhere acting through such representatives of authority as remain in lands which decry it! If docility, obedience, a desire to believe, submission previous to insight, be not, under Christian conditions, characteristics of faith, merely because, under pagan conditions, they might be opposed to spiritual knowledge, then have most believers believed in vain; for error cannot be the foundation of truth. Discernment belongs, by universal confession, to faith, and baptism is the “sacrament of illumination”; but no proposition can be more unreasonable than that faith should begin with, or be identical with, an insight which, in a high [pg 589] degree of conscious development, obviously belongs to the few, and to them under very special circumstances.
Let us return to the philosophy of the “rule of faith.”
No one would deny that the will, even more than the mind, is the seat of faith; but the Protestant theory does not efficiently and practically recognize this truth. Submission is in the will; discernment in the mind. The latter belongs to the man chiefly; the former to the child equally, and the child living on in the Christian man. The whole Catholic system is based on this fact. From it, for instance, follows, by inevitable consequence, the true theory of charity in reference to dogmatic error—that, namely, of “invincible ignorance.” Protestants, and Protestants who repeat the Athanasian Creed, think this expression but an evasion. But “invincible ignorance” means involuntary ignorance of the truth, and is based on the known principle that heresy must be a sin of the will, because faith is a virtue, primarily belonging to the will, when it submits to grace. Now, granting that the internal agency of the Divine Spirit is that which clears the faculty of spiritual discernment and develops faith in the mind, still, assuredly, obedience is trained and faith is rooted in the will by the same Spirit addressing us through its outward organ, the church. “Obedience to the faith” is not a principle only, but a habit. Habits are impressed on us, not by precept only, but by providential circumstance and divine institutions, such as the civil power, parental rule, the weakness of infancy, the hindrances of knowledge, those necessities for social co-operation which train the sympathies.
Implicit faith in the Bible only might, for such as entertained it with absolute and childlike confidence, give rise to no small degree of moral deference, and does so with many Protestants, though not without a considerable alloy of error and of superstition. But a book, though divine, is a book still. It cannot speak, except with the inquirer for an interpreter. It cannot correct misinterpretations. It will often reveal what is sought, and hide what is not desired, but is needed. It will “find” those who find in it what they brought to it. It is plastic in hot and heedless hands. It may train the mental faculties, but it will not practically exercise a habit of submission. If a country, in place of possessing laws, with magistrates to enforce and judges to expound them, possessed nothing but statutes on parchment, and a vast legal literature for their exposition, statutes and comments being alike commended to the private judgment of individuals, would it be possible that subjects could be trained up with the habit or spirit of political obedience? Every man might be educated till he resembled a village attorney; but loyalty would be extinct. The statute-book would still assert the principle of obedience, as does the Bible in spiritual things; but the habit could not thus be formed. To bow exclusively to that which addresses us in abstract terms, and to bow when and how our judgment dictates—this alone is not in reality, though it may be in words, a discipline of humility. To obey God, as represented by man, is that at which pride revolts. The authority of the church in the household and kingdom of Christ is like that of the father in the family and the monarch in his realm. An [pg 590] authority thus objectively embodied has also a special power of working through the affections; and to train them to be the handmaids of faith is one of the special functions of the church. “My little children of whom I travail again,” says S. Paul to his flock. What living church can be imagined as thus addressing her children? Surely none save that one which claims apostolic authority, and does not shrink from proclaiming that faith includes obedience as well as insight. This is not an idle theory. What men in the Roman Catholic Church have entertained the most filial and affectionate reverence for their mother? Her saints—those who had the most ardent love for their Lord, the deepest insight into his Gospel, and the keenest appreciation of its spiritual freedom—the S. Bernards, Thomas à Kempises, Francis de Saleses. To retain obedience as a principle, and yet cheat it of its object, an authentic and real authority, was the “Arch Mock” of the “Reformation.”
A faith thus confirmed and steadied by authentic authority can alone permanently sustain the ardent and enthusiastic devotion of strong minds. Faith, or what seems faith, if resting exclusively on internal feeling and individual opinion, will vehemently, if but transiently, excite the light and the impulsive; but the graver mind will distrust it, even when visited by the more sanguine mood, from a painful sense that it has no power of discriminating between faith and illusion. It will be sure of its own perceptions and sensations; but it cannot contrive wholly to ignore those of its neighbor when they are opposite. It will remember that there are two causes of uncertainty, the first arising when our own premises admit of alternative conclusions, the second when, the conclusions being obvious, the premises are disputed and cannot be proved. It will remember that mathematical and moral intuitions, “though independent of evidence, are yet backed by a practically universal consent (the result of their being, in a large measure, intuitions independent of the will); and it may be disposed to say that if it happened that most people denied that the three angles of a triangle equalled two right angles, I could not indeed believe that they made three, but I might come to believe that I had wandered into a region in which impressions must always seem certain, but yet in which nothing could be authentically known.” Men cannot exchange their tastes; but then they know that tastes are subjective; whereas revealed truth must be objective. Some such misgiving will chill faith commonly in large and steady minds, and thus the whole religious life is struck dead. Enthusiasm will commonly, under such circumstances, belong only to those minds which boil over before they have taken in much heat. A church which makes its censers of paper, not metal, cannot burn incense. A religion which, in any form, includes a “peradventure,” has admitted the formula of nature and lost the “amen” of supernatural truth. It is reduced and transposed. Its raptures are but poetry, its dogma but science, its antiquity but pedantry, its forms but formality, its freedom but license, its authority but convention, its zeal but faction, its sobriety but sloth. It cannot admit of enthusiasm, as it cannot generate it in its nobler and more permanent forms, because it can neither balance nor direct it. Such a faith [pg 591] must install reason in the higher place. A church founded on nothing higher must serve, not rule. It will end by worshipping its bondage.
As in theology there is no possibility of separating dogma from dogma, so there is no possibility of separating the religious affections from a reverence for dogmas, if the mind be an inquiring one. What has been called “loyalty to our Lord,” and contrasted with the “dogmatic spirit,” is a sentiment which depends wholly on what we believe concerning him. But to believe him to be God and man involves an immense mass of profound doctrine which may be held implicitly by the many, but which the student must hold explicitly, or be in a condition of doubt. These subtle questions involve metaphysical speculations; and had we to settle them for ourselves, we must all of us have mastered philosophy before we had learned the lore of Christian love. But how many points are there of a different sort which yet must be certain, if our faith is to be certain—points which no man could settle for himself, and as to which no authority save one secure from error could give us rest! Such are the questions as to the mode of administering sacraments; what form of baptism is valid, and what is invalid; the canonicity of the Scriptures, which, if it depend on our individual estimate of historic evidence only, can rise no higher than the level of opinion, and therefore can never afford a basis for divine faith. No reasonable man can suppose that either directly or indirectly he can reach to intuitions on these points. He may say that they are not essential to him personally; but he cannot but suspect that they are essential to the integrity of that whole scheme of theology which, as a whole, is essential to him. A leak in the ship is not less dangerous because low down and out of sight; and the strength of a chain is the strength of its weakest link. When the principle of authority ceased to be held, as a revealed doctrine (the complement of that of personal spiritual discernment), the complete circle of faith was broken, and an element of doubt entered in. The process was unperceived because gradual, the inherited faith concealing long the ravages of innovating opinion. Human faith succeeded also to divine, and simulated it. Science, imagination, enthusiasm in its ever-varying forms, contributed their aid. Protestant churches can hardly now even conceive of an authority acting simply and humbly under divine faith. They can only imagine anathemas as proceeding from passion. But S. Paul and the early church, as well as the Roman Catholic, thought differently.