Some Christian Convictions | Page 8

adventure;
Clement of Alexandria called it "an enterprise of noble daring to take
our way to God." We trust that the Supreme Power in the world is akin
to the highest within us, to the highest we discover anywhere, and will
be our confederate in enabling us to achieve that highest. Kant found
religion through response to the imperative voice of conscience, in "the
recognition of our duties as divine commands." Pasteur, in the address
which he delivered on taking his seat in the Académie Française,
declared: "Blessed is he who carries within himself a God, an ideal, and
who obeys it; ideal of art, ideal of science, ideal of the gospel virtues,
therein lie the springs of great thoughts and great actions; they all
reflect light from the Infinite."
But while all these views are correct in their affirmations, it is perilous
to exalt one element in religious experience lest we slight others of
equal moment. There is danger in being fractionally religious. No man
really finds God until he seeks Him with his whole nature. Some
persons are sentimentally believers and mentally skeptics; they stand at
the door of the sanctuary with their hearts in and their heads out.
Writing as an old man, Coleridge said of his youth, "My head was with
Spinoza, though my whole heart remained with Paul and John." An
unreasoning faith is sure to end in folly; it is a mind all fire without fuel.
A true religious experience, like a coral island, requires both warmth
and light in which to rise. An unintelligent belief is in constant danger
of being shattered. Hardy, in sketching the character of Alec
D'Uberville, explains the eclipse of his faith by saying, "Reason had
had nothing to do with his conversion, and the drop of logic that Tess
had let fall into the sea of his enthusiasm served to chill its

effervescence to stagnation."
Others, at the opposite extreme, are merely convinced without being
converted. They are appealed to by the idea of God, rather than led into
actual fellowship of life with Him. A striking instance is the historian,
Edward Gibbon, who, at the age of sixteen, unaided by the arguments
of a priest and without the æsthetic enticements of the Mass, was
brought by his reading to embrace Roman Catholicism, and had
himself baptized by a Jesuit father in June, 1753. By Christmas of 1754
he had as thoughtfully read himself out of all sympathy with Rome. He
was undoubtedly sincere throughout, but his belief and subsequent
unbelief were purely matters of judgment. The bases of our faith lie
deeper than our intelligence. We reach God by a passionate compulsion.
We seek Him with our reason only because we have already been
found of Him in our intuitions.
Still others use their brains busily in their religion, but confine them
within carefully restricted limits. Outside these their faith is an
unreasoning assumption. Their mental activity spends itself on the
details of doctrine, while they never try to make clear to themselves the
foundations of their faith. They have keen eyes for theological niceties,
but wear orthodox blinders that shut out all disturbing facts. Cardinal
Newman, for example, declared that dogma was the essential ingredient
of his faith, and that religion as a mere sentiment is a dream and a
mockery. But he was so afraid of "the all-corroding, all-dissolving
skepticism of the intellect in religious inquiries" that he placed the
safeguard of faith in "a right state of heart," and refused to trust his
mind to think its way through to God. Martineau justly complained that
"his certainties are on the surface, and his uncertainties below." We are
only safe as believers when, besides keeping the heart clean, we
press bold to the tether's end Allotted to this life's intelligence.
Those, again, who insist that in religion the willingness is all, forget
that it seems no more in our power to believe than it is to love. We
apparently "fall into" the one as we do into the other; we do not choose
to believe, we cannot help believing. And unless a man's mind is
satisfied with the reasonableness of faith, he cannot "make believe."

Romanes, who certainly wished for fellowship with the Christian God
as ardently as any man, confessed: "Even the simplest act of will in
regard to religion--that of prayer--has not been performed by me for at
least a quarter of a century, simply because it has seemed so impossible
to pray, as it were, hypothetically, that much as I have always desired
to be able to pray, I cannot will the attempt." Christianity has ever laid
stress upon its intellectual appeal. By the manifestation of the truth its
missionaries have, from Paul's day, tried to commend themselves. We
do not hear of "Evidence