What is Faith?

CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION

THE question, ‘“ What is Faith?”, which forms the subject of the following discussion may seem to some persons impertinent and unnecessary. Faith, it may be said, cannot be known except by experience, and when it is known by experience logical analysis of it, and logical separation of it from other experiences, will only serve to destroy its power and its charm. The man who knows by experience what it is to trust Christ, for example, to rest upon Him for salvation, will never need, it may be held, to engage in psychologi- cal investigations of that experience which is the basis of his life; and indeed such investigations may even serve to destroy the thing that is to be investigated.

Such objections are only one manifestation of a tend- ency that is very widespread at the present day, the tendency to disparage the intellectual aspect of the re- ligious life. Religion, it is held, is an ineffable experi- ence; the intellectual expression of it can be symbolical merely; the most various opinions in the religious sphere are compatible with a fundamental unity of life; theology may vary and yet religion may remain the same.

Obviously this temper of mind is hostile to precise definitions. Indeed nothing makes a man more unpop- ular in the controversies of the present day than an

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insistence upon definition of terms. Anything, it seems, may be forgiven more readily than that. Men discourse very eloquently to-day upon such subjects as God, religion, Christianity, atonement, redemption, faith; but are greatly incensed when they are asked to tell in simple language what they mean by these terms. They do not like to have the flow of their eloquence checked by so vulgar a thing as a definition. And so they will probably be incensed by the question which forms the title of this book; in the midst of elo- quent celebrations of faith—usually faith contrasted with knowledge—it seems disconcerting to be asked what faith is. ; This anti-intellectual tendency in the modern world is no trifling thing; it has its roots deep in the entire philosophical development of modern times. Modern philosophy since the days of Kant, with the theology that has been influenced by it, has had as its dominant note, certainly as its present-day result, a depreciation of the reason and a sceptical answer to Pilate’s ques- tion, ‘‘ What is truth?” This attack upon the intellect has been condticted by men of marked intellectual power; but an attack upon the intellect it has been all the same. And at last the logical results of it, even in the sphere of practice, are beginning to appear. <A marked characteristic of the present day is a lamentable intellectual decline, which has appeared in all fields of human endeavour except those that deal with purely material things. The intellect has been browbeaten so long in theory that one cannot be surprised if it is now ceasing to function in practice. Schleiermacher and INTRODUCTION 15

Ritschl, despite their own intellectual gifts, have, it may fairly be maintained, contributed largely to produce that indolent impressionism which, for example in the field of New Testament studies, has largely taken the place of the patient researches of a generation or so ago. The intellectual decadence of the day is not limited to the Church, or to the subject of religion, but appears in secular education as well. Sometimes it is assisted by absurd pedagogic theories, which, whatever their va- riety in detail, are alike in their depreciation of the labour of learning facts. Facts, in the sphere of edu- cation, are having a hard time. The old-fashioned notion of reading a book or hearing a lecture and sim- _ ply storing up in the mind what the book or the lecture contains—this is regarded as entirely out of date. A year or so ago I heard a noted educator give some advice to a company of college professors—advice which was typical of the present tendency in education. It is a great mistake, he said in effect, to suppose that a college professor ought to teach; on the contrary he ought simply to give the students an opportunity to learn. This pedagogic theory of following the line of least resistance in education and avoiding all drudgery and all hard work has been having its natural result; it has joined forces with the natural indolence of youth to produce in present-day education a very lamentable decline. t by The decline has not, indeed, been universal; in the sphere of the physical sciences, for example, the acqui- sition of facts is not regarded as altogether out of date. Indeed, the anti-intellectualistic tendency in religion and

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in those subjects that deal specifically with the things of the spirit has been due, partly at least, to a monopo- listic possession of the intellect on the part of the phy- sical sciences and of their utilitarian applications. But in the long run it is to be questioned whether even those branches of endeavour will profit by their mono- polistic claims; in the long run the intellect will hardly profit by being excluded from the higher interests of the human spirit, and its decadence may then appear even in the material sphere.

But however that may be, whether or not intellectual decadence has already extended or will soon extend to the physical sciences, its prevalence in other spheres— in literature and history, for example, and still more clearly in the study of language—is perfectly plain. An outstanding feature of contemporary education in these spheres is the growth of ignorance; pedagogic theory and the growth of ignorance have gone hand in hand.

The undergraduate student of the present day is being told that he need not take notes on what he hears in class, that the exercise of the memory is a rather childish and mechanical thing, and that what he is really in college to do is to think for himself and to unify his world. He usually makes a poor business of unifying his world. And the reason is clear. He does not suc- ceed in unifying his world for the simple reason that he has no world to unify. He has not acquired a knowledge of a sufficient number of facts in order even to learn the method of putting facts together. He is being told to practise the business of mental digestion;