Faith is the organ of spiritual apprehension, and comes into play whenever we recognise in practice the claim of the ethical ideal as opposed [p.125] to the materialistic, when the will to do the good triumphs over the desire to get the good for our selves. In every act of the inward life by which being is set above having, and by which our own visible happiness is subordinated to that of our fellows, there comes into play this activity of the soul which we call faith, by which we come into contact with that which underlies our hopes, and put to test the things we do not see. [30] <#_edn30> As this faith comes to dominate and control our lives we are able to reach a point at which the old doubts cease to pain us. We may still repeat to ourselves the riddle of life, and seek for an answer; but though we may continue to puzzle to find an explanation, we are conscious that we have known something in the presence of which the ancient questionings cease to trouble. We feel that somehow we have come into touch with a presence which brings with it the solution of the greatest of all problems. In the depths of our lives we listen to the answer of faith. Thus it is that the very words which ring with such a sense of awful despair in the poem of Omar may express nothing but peace to one who has gone through this experience: "He knows about it all, He knows, He knows." The difference lies in this, that to Omar there is as he writes no sense of contact with the Unseen, the Omniscient, in whose power he lies; but to him who [p.126] has heard the answer of Faith that sense of contact has come. He knows that in this deepest experience God has come into touch with him, and henceforth life to him both came and goes, out of God's hand into God's hand. When Christ was confronted by the sceptical Sadducees with the problem of human life enduring beyond the grave, he pointed to their faith that the heroes of old time, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, had had knowledge of God, and told them that this knowledge of God meant life. A being that has come to have communion with the Eternal cannot be conceived of as passing away with the changing husk of things, the accidents of the body and the outer world. Eternal life does not consist in the duration for ever of an accidental process. If we could conceive of a jelly-fish continuing thus an indefinite existence, which should involve neither inward development nor the possession of higher powers than such a creature is commonly believed to be capable of, we should still surely be unable to speak of such existence as eternal life. For what we mean by this is not the mere continuity of existence from a present of transient accidents into a like future, but something which goes beyond death because it goes beyond life too, as life is ordinarily pictured.