THE NECESSITY OF ACTIVE FAITH
W. John Murray
The Necessity of Law
Divine Science Publishing Co,
Inc.
New York, 1924.
[27] There
is one quality of the human mind which
seems most desirable, and from the
ordinary point of view it is the most
difficult to achieve. We all sigh for
it, because we know that if we possess
it we have the foundation of every
other thing which grows out of it, just
as we know that if we have an orchard
or a garden we shall have fruit or
flowers. Every day someone says,
“If I had more faith, I could
accomplish what I want to
accomplish.” The most
materially-minded person in the world
knows what a valuable asset faith is.
That he calls it self-confidence does
not change the fact that faith is what
he means, for faith called by any other
name is just the same. We long for
faith as if it were a something outside
of us, as though it had been left out
of our composition, [28] as certain
ingredients are left out of certain
compounds; while other men seem to
abound in it, we lack it. It seems so
unjust that we come to consider God a
respecter of persons and a bestower of
special favors.
We do not
realize that faith, like our muscular
system, is a something we are born with
and, like our muscular system, is a
something which can only grow and
become strong through exercise. We
yearn for more faith while refusing to
utilize the faith we have, which is as
absurd as it would be to wish for the
muscular strength and development of a
Sandow while we continue to sit in a
rocking-chair and smoke cigarettes. The
ordinary plant has more faith than the
ordinary man, for, instead of remaining
under ground, it pushes its way through
its difficulties and sprouts, while the
ordinary man crumples up and concludes
that his difficulties are too big for
him. The plant seems to know
instinctively that there is something
inside of it that is [29] stronger than
anything external, and that nothing
outside of it can prevent it from
giving expression to itself. The
average man, on the contrary, feels
that the circumstances by which he is
surrounded prevent the thing that is in
him from asserting itself.
Someone
has said that “faith is
trust,” that we should trust God
as we trust a guide in the forest or on
the Alps, or a ship’s captain at
sea; but this practically relieves us
of all responsibility, and where there
is no responsibility there is no
development. If I follow a guide
through a forest or sit in a deck chair
while the captain steers the ship, I
may have a certain amount of mental
comfort and physical rest but it is
doubtful if I shall know any more about
the forest or the sea than I knew
before I walked the one or sailed the
other. One day we shall learn that a
yielding trust is not an active faith.
The child trusts its father to
carry it across a turbulent stream on a
narrow plank but the father has
faith in his capacity to achieve
the feat. We see, then, how trust can
not be [30] used as a synonym for
faith. Trust is the seed of which Faith
is the flower.
It has
been said that faith is reason. If it
is, it is reason rising above the plane
of the senses, for what is ordinarily
called reason usually limits itself to
phenomenal facts. It reasons or argues
from the standpoint of the visible
rather than the invisible and because
of this we hear the faithless reasoner
say of the new and untried in the field
of invention, “It doesn’t
stand to reason.” The reasoner
who cannot see beyond what is already
here has no vision. He is an
obstructionist, a materialist. Reason
is only one side of things of which
faith is the other, for everything has
two sides if we look for them.
Henry Ward
Beecher says, “Sometimes men say
that faith requires us to lay aside our
reason. I beg your pardon, it never
does. It is about faith and reason as
it is about birds that both run and
fly. A turkey that runs around in the
woods never rises suddenly. It first
runs on the ground till it gains
sufficient momentum to enable it to
rise and [31] fly. Reason is like legs
that run on the ground, and as soon as
you have come to the end of the earth,
if you need more, and you have faith,
lift your wings and you can fly; but
one follows the other. Faith never can
be said to be coincident with reason.
Reason is that faculty which knows
things as far as they can be known; and
up to the point to which they can be
found out, you are free to use it; but
when you get to the end of knowing
(with the intellect) if you have faith,
then fly. All beyond is the region of
faith. Faith is that which takes
cognizance of things that are not
within the sphere of knowing
(intellectually).”
Until a
man develops his faith, which is
already in him as a gift of God, he is
like that same turkey, endowed with
both legs and wings, but which uses
only its legs. Legs are all right in
their place but they will never enable
us to rise above our limitations. Legs
may help us to run away from things,
which we shall run into again just
around the corner, but we must rise on
wings if we are to [32] rise at all.
Now, if faith is not limited to trust,
nor confined to reason, may it not be
that it is an attitude of thought which
uses trust and reason as rungs in the
Jacob’s ladder of spiritual
investigation by which to mount to
heights of achievement otherwise
unattainable?
The widow
who went to Elisha is a splendid
illustration of that form of thought
which rises above difficulties a step
at a time. Her trust in Elisha was like
the trust of a child in its parent. At
first it was blind and unquestioning.
It made her do anything that Elisha
bade her, even though at first she
could not see the reason. She had used
her legs to run and they had carried
her at last through one disappointment
after another to the place where she
knew that of herself she could do
nothing. Like the rest of us, she had
trusted that something would show up
but as one day followed another and
things grew no better, she reasoned
within herself that two heads were
better than one and that she ought to
seek advice. It was no longer a
question of waiting but of [33]
working. She must do something as well
as think something. If she had
been saying what the Psalmist said,
“The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall
not want,” she must prove that
she believed it. She must act as if
back of her little store of oil there
was an inexhaustible supply. Trust and
reason had brought her as far as they
could and now she stood where she was
called upon to rely on something which
she could never know until she tried
it. As the swimmer trusts the water,
and the aviator the air, she must now
trust Pure Spirit.
To the boy
who wishes to swim there is a moment
when he cannot understand how a fluid
can support a solid. To the man who
wishes to dominate the air there is a
time when he cannot conceive that a
weighty material object can rest on the
soft bosom of the ether; and so it must
be to one who has been taught to
believe that unless material conditions
are met by material means, they cannot
be met at all. We can understand how
loaves can be taken out of an oven and
how fishes can be taken out of [34] the
sea, but we cannot understand how all
the constituent elements of both loaves
and fishes can be abstracted from the
ether by a man of genius whose
knowledge of spiritual laws is as
scientific and demonstrable as are the
laws of physical chemistry to the
chemist. A youth in a class in
gymnastics stands by the horizontal bar
while the teacher explains the method
of making the “giant
swing.” The youth trusts
the bar, for he has seen others make
the swing. He reasons that
because others have accomplished the
feat under the director’s
instructions, he ought to be able to
accomplish it, but he can never
know that he can do it too until
he has done it for himself.
This,
then, is faith--doing the thing you
want to do, because you want to do it,
and can do it, if you think you can.
Faith is a synthesis or uniting
together of reason and determination,
or insight and application, by means of
which a third condition is produced. As
a synthesis, faith is a process which
imparts new properties to its product,
and by [35] so doing accomplishes what
can not be accomplished by any other
means.
While
faith can not be forced it can be
cultivated, for faith is neither more
nor less than knowledge. It is the
consent of reason to what reason
comprehends as true.
Faith is
an inward seeing--the God-given
capacity to perceive an idea
before it is seen as an objective
manifestation. Just as Columbus
perceived a Western Continent before he
saw it, the widow through faith
perceived the unlimited supply before
she saw it running from her tiny cruse
into the other and larger vessels.
Faith is
not blind. Its eye is clear-visioned
imagination, or that image-making
faculty of the mind from which all that
is really original takes its rise.
The
philosopher imagines his theory
and then brings all the forces of
research and investigation to bear to
substantiate it. All new designs in the
world of trade, all colors in the world
of art, commercial or otherwise, are
first imagined, and then executed,
otherwise [36] there would be imitation
everywhere and originality nowhere.
The
lesson, then, in the pouring of the oil
into larger vessels is the very
necessary one of so exercising the
faith we have as to cause it to
increase. To believe that back of our
seeming little there is a Real Much,
and to show our belief by action, is a
mental appropriation of it, and to
appropriate it mentally is to possess
it visibly, if not today, then
tomorrow, or some other day.
* * * *
*
(Formerly at
Northwoods Divine Science Resource
Center)
