not given us to use as a decorative adjunct to life. Faith bids us go through the whole of our life in the spirit of a worshipper; and, as in the ancient mysteries, the fairest and fullest visions are reserved for the end of the course. Faith, meanwhile, has to grapple with much intractable ugliness, only secure of her final victory.

CHAPTER XIII

FAITH AS HARMONIOUS SPIRITUAL DEVELOPMENT

We have now reached the last stage of our inquiry into the nature of Faith. We have found that it is a divine endowment of human nature, which operates through our natural faculties. It emerges into consciousness as a vague instinct-a prompting which impels us to look for a meaning in life-to seek behind the veil of ever-changing phenomena some permanent and solid reality which shall be proof against the wreckful siege of battering days,' and which, by setting before us an absolute standard, shall give us the right always to aspire. This instinct is of varying intensity, but at first it is without form and void. It seeks for forms, for a mould which it may enter, and generally finds it in one or other of the creeds which are presented to it as authoritative. But whereas it is potentially rich in varied contents, capable of correspondences which link our complex human nature with the divine, and whereas all these correspondences are at first wrapped up and withdrawn from consciousness, Faith can never come to its own except by being lived into-experienced in a life which should be as full and rich and as many-sided as possible. There are no short cuts to a perfect Faith, though there are many provisional and avowedly premature syntheses of which we may and must avail ourselves.

'Faith is life,' as Mr. Skrine says in his beautiful little book, What is Faith? 1 What to the vine-branch is

1 P. 30 sqq.

If

living, that to man is believing. We, like the branch, are saved if we abide in the Vine, that is, if we are alive. life is the adjustment of the internal relations of a living thing to the external relations, Faith is the response of the organism which we name the soul, to that environment which we call God. Souls are kept in life by their obedience to one law-their true response to all the forces touching them, which come from God.' A man's salvation is measured by the degree in which he is alive. Is he in definite, full, various, increasing correspondence with God? Is he alive on the side of mind? Does the organ, by which he is sensible to the world of fact, adjust its activities to the arrangement of those facts? Does it mirror things as they are and not as he would wish them to be? Does it weave on the magic loom of consciousness the true pattern of the landscape beyond the window of self? Is he alive on the side of emotion? Is there an answer of the heart to the relations of that nearest environment, Humanity? Has he love, which is the response to the fact of a brotherhood encircling him? Are his sympathies quick, and does a neighbour's grief stir pity in him, and his joy a joy? Is he alive on the side of action ? Does the movement of the practical order-the thing that is done upon earth-stir a vibration in his will? Do the things that God doeth Himself-His works seen in the process of nature and in the state-find him a fellow-worker? Does he by his activity propel, and by his passivity smooth, the march of betterment? To do and be these things is to be alive; and to live is to be in Faith.'

I am glad to quote these eloquent words, which express very well the general view of the normal growth and life of Faith which I have upheld in these lectures. All through I have been deprecating that tendency to snatch at some creed or formula or theory which will save us any more trouble. We have found guides who say to us: Take this vague Faith-consciousness as it is. Intensify it

and enjoy it, but do not analyse it or test it. Or: Tell it to endorse, unexamined, the creed which we present to you. Let Faith back the bill, recklessly, and you will then be happy. Or: Make Faith the sworn ally of your moral sense, which is the most important part of us, and let the rest go. Regard the 'world as will," and all that is non-moral in it as merely instrumental, even unreal. Or: Pin your Faith to science or philosophy, and let your religion be 'the intellectual love of God.' Or, lastly: Love harmony and beauty within and without. Let your life be a poem in God's honour. These premature syntheses all leave out some essential part of our nature. We cannot acquiesce in them, just because we are one ourselves, not a collection of independent faculties. We are driven to aim at unifying our outward experience as well as our inward lives. So strong is this craving for unity that it seems to me a faithless act to refuse the quest.

The belief that Reality must be one does not rest on any fancied superiority of the number One over the number Two, but on the fact that inclusiveness and harmony belong to the idea of reality. If there is such a thing as a Divine Mind, it must be at unity with itself, and it must embrace all things.

But though our object is to discover the underlying unity of reality, we do not wish to fall into the error attributed by some to Greek philosophy-that of regarding the individual as something to be explained away. We understand a thing in proportion as we recognise its unique features, the things which make it different from all other things. If we begin by saying that since all things are one, all dividing lines must be illusory, our minds will be reduced to a blank. It is only in the dark that all colours agree. There is a sense in which the only way to know the whole of reality is to know one part, no matter how small, through and through. This is why the quietistic mysticism, to which I referred in an early lecture of this

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course, is so unsatisfactory. It shuns and distrusts all particular truths, and in consequence gives us only a blank sheet of paper, at which we may gaze if we will till we fall into a trance. If any definite form emerges from the trance, it is certain that it was not created by the trance, but that it is a vivid picture of something which we have been taught; probably the product of ages of reflection upon the eternal world. Moreover, the fact that the whole may be known by thoroughly knowing one part, is a principle of great practical importance. For complete all-round self-culture is an impossibility, and we cannot even aim at it without danger of becoming futile dilettanti. We have to limit ourselves strictly and narrowly. We have to be something particular, which excludes the possibility of becoming a hundred other particular things. Some real self-sacrifice is a necessary consequence of being members of a body and we must accept it. What we miss in this way we must supply as best we can from authority -by borrowing, that is to say, from others. But the loss is not very great. For all thorough work has an universal quality about it; so that the man who can do any one worthy thing well, is not generally narrow-minded. He knows far more about God, the world, and his own soul than the dabbler who is Jack of all trades, and master of none. This is one of the things which justifies us in holding a reasonably optimistic view about human society. No civilisation is possible without division of labour, and all division of labour involves one-sidedness, and, in a sense, the mutilation of personality. But as the theologians of the Divine Immanence have insisted that God is not only everywhere, but in omnibus totus, so it appears that faithful devotion to any worthy pursuit does open to us avenues extending to the Infinite. Browning's grammarian found this even in the study of Greek syntax. If this case is historical, some of you will think that no one need despair.