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V.

THE REASON OF FAITH.

JOHN vi. 36.-"But I said unto you, That ye also have seen me and believe not.”

Ir is the grand distinction of Christianity, that by which it is separated from all philosophies and schemes of mere ethics, that it makes its appeal to faith and upon that, as a fundamental condition, rests the promise of salvation. It is called the word of faith, the disciples are distinguished as believers, and Christ is published as the Saviour of them that believe.

the boast of apostles, is the Were the word any thing

But precisely this, which is scandal and offense of men. but a word of faith; a word of rhetoric, or of reason, or of absolute philosophy, or of ethics, or of grammar and lexicography, they could more easily accept it; but, finding it instead a word of faith, they reject and scorn it. As if there were some merit, or could be some dignity in faith! What is it but an arbitrary condition, imposed to humble our self-respect, or trample our proper intelligence? For what is there to value or praise, say they, in the mere belief of any thing? If we hold any truth by our reason, or by some act of perception, or by the showing of sufficient evidence, what need of holding it by faith? If we undertake to hold it without such evidence, what is our belief in it but a surrender of our proper intelligence?

This kind of logic, so common as even to be the cant of our times, has all its plausibility in its own defect of

insight, and nothing is wanting, in any case, to its com plete refutation, but simply a due understanding of what faith is, and what the office it fills. In this view, I propose a discourse on the reason of faith; or to show how it is that we, as intelligent beings, are called to believe; and how, as sinners, we can, in the nature of things, be saved only as we believe.

I select the particular passage, just cited, for my text, simply because it sets us at the point where seeing and believing are brought together; expecting to get some advantage, as regards the illustration of my subject, from the mutual reference of one to the other, as held in such prox. imity. In this verse, (the 36th,) they are brought together as not being united,-ye have seen me and believe not. Shortly after, (in the 40th verse,) they are brought together as being, or to be united,-every one that seeth the Son and believeth on him.

Now the first thing we observe, for it stands on the face of the language, is that faith is not sight, but something different; so different that we may see and not believe. The next thing is that sight does not, in the scripture view, exclude faith, or supersede the necessity of it, as the common cavil supposes; for, after sight, faith is expected. And still, a third point is, that sight is supposed even to furnish a ground for faith, making it obligatory and, where it is not yielded, increasing the guilt of the subject; which appears, both in the complaint of one verse and the re quirement of the other.

Thus much in regard to the particular case of the per sons addressed; for they were such as had themselves seen Christ, witnessed his miracles, heard his teachings, and

watched the progress of his ministry. In that respect, our case is different. We get, by historic evidences, what they got by their senses. The attestations we have, are even more reliable evidences, I think, than those of sight; but they bring us to exactly the same point, viz., a settled im pression of fact. That such a being lived they saw with their eyes, and we are satisfied that he lived by other evi dences addressing our judging faculty, as sight addressed theirs. We take their case, accordingly, as the case proposed, and shape our argument to it.

Suppose then that you had lived as a contemporary in the days of Christ; that you had been privy to the dia logue between the angel and Mary, and also, to all the intercourse of Mary and Elizabeth; that you had heard the song of the angels at the nativity, and seen their shining forms in the sky; that you was entirely familiar with the youth of Jesus, was present at his baptism, saw him begin his ministry, heard all his discourses, witnessed all his miracles, stood by his cross in the hour of his passion; that you saw him, heard him, ate with him, touched him after his resurrection, and finally beheld his ascension from Olivet. You have had, in other words, a complete sense view of him, from his first breath onward. What now loes all this signify to you?

Possibly much, possibly nothing. If received without any kind of faith, absolutely nothing; if with two kinds of faith which are universally practiced, it signifies the greatest fact of history; if with a third, equally rational and distinctively Christian, it signifies a new life in the soul, and cternal salvation.

Let us, in the first place, look at these two kinds of

faith which are universally practiced; for, if faith is, in the nature of things, absurd or unintelligent, we shall be as likely to discover the fact here as anywhere. And we may discover, possibly, that the very persons who discard faith, as an offense to intelligence, are not even able to do the commonest acts of intelligence without it.

We begin, then, with the case of sight, or perception by sight. It has been, as some of you know, a great, or even principal question with our philosophers, for the last hundred years, and these are commonly the people most ready to complain of faith, how it is that we perceive objects? The question was raised by Berkeley's denial that we see them at all, which, though it convinced nobody, puzzled every body. He said, for example, that the persons who saw Christ did not really see him, they had only certain pictures cast in the back of the eye; which pictures, he maintained, were mere subjective impressions, nothing more; that, by the supposition, spectators are ne ver at the objects, but only at the images, which are all, intellectually speaking, they know any thing about. If they take it as a fact, that they see real objects, they do it by a naked act of assumption, and, for aught that appears, impose upon themselves. The question, accordingly, has been, not whether real objects are perceived, for that is not often questioned now, but how we can imagine them to be; how, in other words, it is that we bridge the gulf between sensations and their objects; how it is that, having a tree-picture or a star-picture in the back of the eyc, we make it to be a tree, really existing on some distant hill, or a real star, filling its measurable space many hundred millions of miles distant? Some deny the possibility of any solution; reducing even sight itself and all that we call

evidence m it to a mystery forever transcending intelligence. The best solutions agree virtually in this:—they conceive the soul to be such a creature that, when it has these forms in the eye, it takes them, as it were, instinctively, to be more than forms, viz., objects perceived; which is the same as to say that we complete sensation itself, or issue it in perception, by assigning reality ourselves to the distant object. And what is this, but to say that we do it by a kind of sense-faith contributed from ourselves? In our very seeing we see by faith, and, without the faith, we should only take in impressions to remain as last things in the brain. Hence, perhaps, the word perception, a through-taking, because we have taken hold of objects through distances, and so have bridged the gulf between us and reality. Is then sight itself unintelligent, because it includes an act of faith? Or, if we believe in realities, and have them by believing, would it be wiser and more rational to let alone realities and live in figures and phantasms, painted on the retina of our eyes?

But there is another kind of faith, less subtle than this which also is universally practiced, and admitted universally to be intelligent. It is that kind of faith which, af ter sensation is passed, or perception is completed, assigns truth to the things seen, and takes them to be sound his toric verities. Thus, after Christ had been seen in all the facts of his life, it became a distinct question what to make of the facts; whether possibly there could have been scme conspiracy in the miracles; some collusion, or acting in the parts of Mary and her son; some self-imposition, or hallucination that will account for his opinions of himself and the remarkable pretensions he put forth; whether

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