So men come into the sort of personal and social life that Jesus
represents. Apart from any theories, they value the life itself--its
ideals of character, friendship, service, trust. If honesty allows,
they propose to live that life. When a man has gone far enough in
Christian experience, so that he comes up to his intellectual
difficulties by such a road, he is likely to profit by a consideration
of the reasons in favor of faith. He is in the attitude of saying: I
have found great living in Christ. No argument for the Christian
experience can be quite so convincing as the Christian experience
itself. I am bound to have that life if I honestly can, and I will
search to see whether there is any insuperable intellectual difficulty
in the way of it.
II
One of the initial perplexities of faith concerns the sort of
intellectual assurance which we have a right to expect. In a
laboratory of physics, the investigator gathers facts, makes
inductions as to their laws, and then verifies his findings. He uses a
simplicity of procedure and gains a finality of result that makes all
other knowledge seem relatively insecure. To be sure, the scientist
may seek long for his truth and make many ineffectual guesses that
prove false, but, in the end, he reaches a conclusion so demonstrable
that every man of wit enough to investigate the subject must agree
that it is so. How the Christian wishes for such certainty concerning
God!
Before, however, any one surrenders confidence in God, because
confessedly the affirmations of religious faith cannot be established
by such methods as a physicist employs, there is ample reason for
delay. We are certain that heat expands and cold contracts, and we can
prove the fact and state its laws. But are we not also sure that it is
wrong to lie and right to tell the truth? This conviction about
truthfulness at least equals in theoretical certainty and in practical
right to determine conduct, our confidence in heat's expanding power.
This conviction about truthfulness does actually sway life more than
does any single scientific truth that one can name. Let us then set
ourselves to prove our moral confidence by such methods as the
physical laboratory can supply--with yard sticks, and Troy weight
scales, and test tubes, and meters! At once it is evident that if we
are to hold only such truth as is amenable to the demonstration of a
laboratory, we must bid farewell to every _moral conviction_ that
hitherto has influenced our lives. God, banished because the physicist
cannot prove him, will have good company in exile!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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