now into bare trust and confidence in a divine Person; now into a subjective assurance which claims to be its own evidence; now into vague feeling; now into a cheerful optimistic outlook upon the world; now into implicit obedience and submission to authority. It will be my object in these Lectures to do justice to the partial truth contained in these various one-sided views, while exposing their limitations.

CHAPTER III

THE PRIMARY GROUND OF FAITH

We have sketched the history of the word Faith and its cognates in the Bible and in the Church, and have shown how from the first it has been, for Christians, the accepted term for the religious temper traced back to its source. Faith, Hope, and Love, with Faith at the beginning, Hope in the middle, and Love at the end, as the crown and fulfilment of the other two-this is Christianity in a nutshell. And we have seen how the two meanings of intellectual conviction and moral trust, which both legitimately belong to the words Tíoris, fides, Faith, and to the Christian virtue which they describe, were brought together in the New Testament, never again to be divided, but also never, as history shows, to work quite smoothly together. In this lecture I wish to approach our subject from a very different side the psychological-and ask, What is the primary ground of Faith, as a human faculty or state of consciousness?

What is the seat of Faith? Does it spring from the intellectual side of our nature? Do we attain to Faith by carefully weighing the evidence for the existence of God, for a future life, for the Resurrection of Christ, or the Virgin Birth, or the historical accuracy of the narratives in the Old Testament? Or shall we, still within the province of the intellect, agree with Fichte that we are saved, not by history, but by metaphysics,' and base our Faith on the conclusions of some philosophical system? Or, with

orthodox Romanism, shall we maintain that the main facts of religion, the foundations of theistic belief, have been demonstrated by the scholastic philosophy, confirming and supplementing the divine revelation which has also been given us? Or shall we, with Schleiermacher, abandon rationalism, both orthodox and unorthodox, and make religion a matter of pure feeling? Or, with some of the mystics, shall we affirm the existence of direct intuition, through a special organ, which puts us into immediate connection with God and the spiritual world? Or shall we follow the voluntarists, and make Faith an affair of choice, an act of the will? Or are the pragmatists right in treating it as a working hypothesis, determined by practical needs, and to be accepted, if we choose, 'at our own risk'? Or, lastly, is it founded solely on external revelation, a body of divine knowledge and precept dropped from the sky? These alleged grounds of Faith will all have to be considered in turn, though not in the order in which I have just named them. But I am constrained to regard them all as, at best, only secondary grounds of Faith. None of them singly, nor all of them collectively, are adequate to the idea of Faith. Faith is something deeper, more universal, more fundamental, than anything that can be assigned to the independent activities of the intellect, will, or feelings. Behind all these determinations lies the deep-seated religious instinct or impulse,

1

This innate instinct or impulse arises in the psychological necessity which obliges us to assign values to our experience. It is our nature to pass judgments, to call some things good, others bad, to acquit and condemn, accept and reject. We rearrange our world according to what we consider the worth of its ingredients to be. Objects, after passing through our minds, are no longer all on the same

1 So Lotze says, 'Faith is the feeling which is appreciative of value.' But I shall show that Faith is not only feeling, if 'feeling' excludes the will and intellect.

level. They are ranked and classified; a hierarchy of values is established.

It is impossible for the human mind to inhibit this native propensity to assign values. We may try to force ourselves to regard nature objectively, as a concatenation of facts upon which we forbear to pass judgment. But the most rigorous and detached scientist, unless he confines himself to pure mathematics, which are independent of existential truth, cannot abstain from some kind of valuation. (There are other values besides ethical values, as we shall shortly explain.) However rigidly we may confine ourselves to quantitative categories in the course of our investigations, we have set before ourselves a purpose-to establish the general laws to which the changes of phenomena conform ; and we could never embark on such an enterprise unless we believed that the knowledge of general laws has either an intrinsic or a practical value. In most cases the assumed value is intrinsic; the man of science seeks truth for its own sake. It is sometimes worth while to prove to the materialist (for the creed is not extinct, though the name is disavowed) that he has imported into his system a great deal that on his own principles he has no right to touch; that all sympathetic interest in the results of molecular movements is an intrusion of the value-judgment into a field from which it has been by hypothesis excluded; that he has no right to talk about ' progress,' or ' degeneration,' or 'the survival of the fittest.' For the truth is, that to investigate the purely quantitative aspect of things without reference to the qualitative, to discard all reference to meaning, interest, or value, is to attempt an abstraction which is impossible to the human mind. These are aspects of reality which we cannot keep out of sight, even when we wish to ignore them.1

1 Cf. Miss Benson's Venture of Rational Faith:-'There is nothing in the scientific aspect of phenomena which can make anything in any possible way worth while; for even the idea of "worth" does not enter into the conceptions of science, and thus the essential nature of everything we care for is

The world, then, has values as well as existence. And I do not mean only values for ourselves, but intrinsic values -or, if this phrase be objected to, values which for all who can apprehend them are ends in themselves, not means to something else. We do not create or imagine these values; they are as much given to us as the existential aspect of things. We cannot prove that the world exists; and we cannot prove that our valuation is anything more than subjective; but Faith accepts these values, not as assigned by ourselves, but as objectively real. Somewhere, some day, or somehow, the real world is arranged according to their pattern.

Faith has usually connected this realm of values with the name of God. God-whether the God of theism, pantheism, agnostic monism, or deism-is the self-existent summum genus in whom we believe that our highest ideals are realised. Those who deny or doubt the existence of God, while retaining the conception of God as a regulative idea or ideal, seem to me to be, strictly speaking, nonreligious. If the idea of God is only a device, empirically discovered to be serviceable for strengthening our wills and straightening our aims-just as a man might use a pair of spectacles to correct his faults of vision, or a pair of dumb-bells to increase his muscular strength,-God is lowered to the position of an instrument; and this is an

entirely outside it. Science can analyse the production of sound, and ignore the soul of music; it can show the cause of colour, and miss the joy of beauty; it can show the genesis of all manner of social institutions, and miss the heart of love; it may even find the conditions of life, but cannot ask what life is; it may sweep the heavens with its telescope, and fail to find God.'

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1 This limitation does not exclude Buddhism, though that religion believes in no personal God. For in Buddhism the Nothing to which all is reduced is (in spite of its name) a positive conception. It is the absolute worldground, the fact behind the illusions of the world; the absolute being, the static basis of all phenomena; it is the absolute world-aim, after which the world-process strives and in which it finds its deliverance; the bearer and producer of the religious and moral world-order, which brings out what alone is true and enduring in illusion, and turns the illusory world-process into an actual salvation-process.'-Hartmann, Religion des Geistes, p. 5. Buddhism is not atheism; it only deifies the 'a-privative.'