private interests, becomes wholly blind to whatever of truth, beauty, or goodness God has spread before us for our delight and edification.1 It is plain, then, that Faith requires certain personal qualities. If we are too stupid to ask for any meaning in our experience, too self-absorbed to be interested in anything that does not concern our petty affairs, too frivolous to care seriously for what can only be cared for seriously, too gloomy to hope, or too wilful to learn, we are labouring under fatal disqualifications for the experience of Faith. This is the meaning of the words of Christ: 'If any man is willing to do His will, he shall know of the doctrine,' and 'Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.' What distinguishes Faith from existential knowledge is the recognition of an objective, external, and ideal standard of value-of an idea, or system of ideas, of goodness, truth, and beauty, by which things given in experience may be judged and classified. It is an essential part of Faith that this standard should be applied to given experience, and it is also requisite that experience should be appealed to in verification of the claims of Faith. This last point is important; and it leads us to recognise a peculiarity of the conditions under which Faith is exercised. The verification to which Faith appeals can never be complete while we live here. Truths of the eternal order seem to be always broken and refracted as they reach us. They manifest themselves to concrete experience in an oppositional, bipolar form, so that we continually find ourselves confronted by an obstinate negation. Truth, we may almost say, is a spark which is only generated by friction. This, it may be, is a necessary condition of the world of becoming. 1 The word 'selfishness' must here be extended to cover all purely selfregarding motives. Faith must have an object outside self. Theoretical self-knowledge, egoism, refined or otherwise, the desire of self-improvement as an absolute end, are outside the religious sphere. Religious attention to one's own character, knowledge, or circumstances has always reference to an objective standard, and derives its sanction from a principle outside the self. Cf. Hartmann, Religion des Geistes, p. 4. One reason why Faith cannot verify itself is that the world is still in the making. In the words of St. Paul, we see not yet all things put under the Son of God, 'in whom (nevertheless) all things consist.' In all probability humanity (even if, with the latest authorities, we push back the beginnings of civilisation ten or fifteen thousand years) is still a child, and will scale heights yet undreamed of. It would indeed be strange and, to a thoughtful man, disquieting, if our experience were symmetrically rounded off, so that no further growth in knowledge could be expected. Faith, then, transcends experience'; it appears as a constructive activity. It employs the imagination to fill out what is wanting in experience. Faith endeavours to find harmony in apparent discord, and to anticipate the workings of the divine purpose. In a sense, all thought may be said to 'transcend experience,' if by experience we mean sense-perception; and Faith, as we have seen, is not merely a function of thought, but a basal energy of the whole man. It includes an element of will; and the office of will is not to register experience, but to make it. Faith, therefore, always contains an element of risk, of venture; and we are impelled to make the venture by the affinity and attraction which we feel in ourselves (through the infusion, as Christians believe, of a higher light and life from above) to those eternal principles which in the world around us appear to be only struggling for supremacy. So far we have maintained that the primary ground of Faith is a normal and ineradicable feeling, instinct, or attraction, present in all minds which are not disqualified from having it by peculiarities which we should all agree, probably, in calling defects, a feeling or instinct that behind the world of phenomena there is a world of eternal values, attracting us towards itself. These values are manifested, and exercise their attraction, in and through phenomena, though the section of the world which we know, and from which we generalise, is an inadequate receptacle for them. Further, these values have been classified as ideas of Truth, Beauty, and Goodness, a threefold cord which is not quickly broken. This is the most general description possible of the objects and contents of Faith, and it is, I believe, all that this primary ground of Faith gives us. It contains vast implications, which can only be unravelled by the full experience of life, developing our personality along the lines of thought, will, and feeling. These three faculties have a natural connection with the ideals of the true, the good, and the beautiful respectively, though we though we must avoid most carefully the error of separating things which can never exist independently of each other. CHAPTER IV FAITH AS PURE FEELING IN my last lecture I tried to keep to the most universal and primary aspects of Faith. But I have gone further in differentiating its activities and aspirations than some would wish to follow me. There are some who wish to keep the Faith-feeling uncontaminated by thought and will; who desire that it should remain a vague, mysterious apprehension of the infinite, an immediate intuition of the ineffable. It would be a mistake to include all the mystics under this class. The greatest mystics have not made the mistake of identifying the primary ground of Faith with feeling, if by feeling is meant the faculty which psychologists recognise as constituting, together with thought and will, our psychical life. The differentia of mysticism is an intense inner life; the drama of the mystic's spiritual ascent, his struggle after purification, illumination, and unity with the Divine, is played out within his mind and not on the stage of history. But whatever may be his notion of the perfect state, when he shall have attained the Beatific Vision, his life is by no means one of pure emotion; it is characterised by intense striving, and often by profound thought. The mystics with whom we are concerned in this lecture are the Quietists-those whose favourite maxim is, 'Be still then, and know that I am God'; and we have also to deal with emotional theism, which is not quite the same as mysticism. We cannot be surprised that many have supposed that Faith is a pure feeling. For our feelings seem to us to be the deepest and most vivid of our experiences. Thought never shows us what a thing is in itself, but only how it is related to other objects. Feeling, especially those most characteristic feelings, love and hate, goes deeper, As Tennyson says in that wonderful poem, The Ancient Sage: For Knowledge is the swallow on the lake ... Religion, too, in its various moods is intimately connected with the emotions. Fear, humility, love, trust, remorse, the joy of reconciliation, the pain of estrangement, are all emotional states. Moreover, there is a vast and half-explored background of vague feeling which fades away into the subconscious, a reservoir of life behind consciousness, which seems as if it might be the very soil out of which Faith springs and grows. If we could tap this subliminal self, and force it to give up its secrets, should we not find our Faith definite, explicit, and selfsufficing? So the mystic wishes to interrogate this dark background, to bring it into the light. He does not wish to contaminate it with infusions from his surface consciousness, but to see what the twilight conceals. Now the genuineness of the pure mystical experience— the feeling which the devout mystic interprets as the immediate presence of God-is proved beyond cavil. I am not speaking now of that rare trance which Plotinus enjoyed four times and Porphyry once, but of something much more familiar-those 'consolations' which almost all religious people enjoy at times during their devotions. There is reason to believe that the majority of people who believe in God do so because they consider that they have |