Let Us Have Faith (Chapter 1)

Let Us Have Faith

For those of us who mourn the wrecking of half a civilization and the noble values it gave us to serve it is hard to see good in the future. Blessings once sweet have turned to ashes because millions are in utter want of all things. But however dark the world may seem we have a light at our command. It is faith, and it is ours to do with as we will. For faith is thought directed toward good, and like all thought-power it is infinite.

Faith is a brave look of the soul for new paths to life. It is not dogma. It is a white fire of enthusiasm. Even in its perverted forms it is the strongest motive force we have. In its highest forms it is the kindler of all nobility. It is not confined to any church or institution. Creeds are bodies and die. Faith is immortal.

How vital it is—this hunger that leads people to look for truth in the Bible, the Vedas and the Koran! It is faith—marshaling the most useful and ennobling ideas for all men—that the loftiest thinkers in every age and country have striven and are still striving to impart.

In capturing faith’s pure passion and enthusiasm they have abandoned superficial associations with time, number and size. Wherever a courageous soul rises man is invincible. Faith sanctifies any place, renders its climate bracing to weakness, its air luminous to doubt-dimmed eyes. Continents sink; empires disintegrate; but faith and the universe of heroic minds abide forever.

Faith transmutes circumstance, time, condition and mood into vitality. This is why Christ’s teaching was momentously effective nineteen centuries ago and still is among those who truly respond to it. Society was regenerated by a race of slaves in the early days of Christianity. To all practical intents and purposes they were chattels and beasts of burden, with eyes that saw not, ears that heard not and wills that were paralyzed by tyranny. Nevertheless, at Jesus’ advent they walked erect and wholehearted and went straight to the fact that life, the Kingdom of God, is within us. From confidence in God they distilled confidence in their fellow men. They kept their souls unmanacled, their minds open to visions and their bodies alert for fulfilment. That was Jesus’ miracle for all ages.

Over against a society marked by caste and brute supremacy, throttled by ignorance except for the amazing intellectual activity in a few cities, faith shouldered the issues of life which must be shouldered today. “Bear ye one another’s burdens,” faith declared, and it went further. It left an inner light as a trust for all human beings. It began remolding the world according to hitherto untried ideas. It made the first purposeful scrutiny of the profundities of the collective soul, and Divine Modesty cried, “Ye shall do mightier things than these.”

In days like these to believe that Good is the dominant principle is an ordeal as by fire, but for me it would be much harder to surrender that faith. All too well do I realize that the bitterest fears of modern thinkers did not envisage the ruin into which we are now being hurled. So much more then is faith imperative to pour healing upon blinding anguish and deafening fear. Heaven and earth, it has been affirmed, are mirages rising from the deserts of man’s despair. Picturesque indeed would despair be if it could perform such a miracle. But to everyone with faith his own world is real, no matter what it may appear to be to others, and happiness—its fundamental meaning is a free breathing of the soul—has also a share in the mirage. From the delight of young animals in simply being alive, from children at play, from youth risking all for love, from the triumphs that follow long effort—from all these faith gathers materials for her Temple to form a bulwark against the storm.

I believe in immortality as instinctively as the fruit tree in the seed and quite as growingly, but that is not faith, except as it shines among its aggregate of nerving truths. Without immortality faith would still count it a magnificent vision to look upon God’s face a brief while, to hold a beloved mortal’s hand, to receive a child’s kiss and look through a glass millions of miles to other universes.