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An essay by Henry Frederick Cope |
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The Force Of Faith |
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Title: The Force Of Faith Author: Henry Frederick Cope [More Titles by Cope] "The Victory that Overcometh"
When a good man gets down in the dirt some one is sure to stumble over him. Many a man who would make a first-class lighthouse is wasting his life trying to be a fog-horn. The mournful saint works a good deal more harm than the cheerful sinner. The faith that shows up strong on the fence may fail altogether when it gets on the field. It's not the man who says the loudest amen who makes the most impression on heaven. There are too many folks trying to meet the world's hunger for love with essays on affection. Lots of people let their daily manna spoil while they pray for butter and sugar to spread on it. People who lay their sins on the old Adam are not anxious to have their successes attributed to him. Many a man thinks his life is clouded over when the truth is he is burying his head in the steam of his own sighings.
"THE VICTORY THAT OVERCOMETH" You cannot believe little things and do great ones; you cannot believe in half successes and accomplish whole ones. A man's faith sets the boundaries of his work. He will do what he believes and accomplish what he believes can be accomplished. Mountains are not subdued by men who stand discouraged at a mole-hill. A man must conquer the fatigues of the way in his own heart or he will never set out on the road. Back of all free action lies some creed, some conviction. All great battles have been fought and either lost or won in the heart. The simple or stubborn confidence that leads to all-conquering effort, this is faith, the vision that vitalizes. The eye of faith sees the prize at the end long before it is reached; the eye of fear looks so closely at the difficulties and dangers of the course that the prize is not seen at all. There is a good deal of fatalism seeking to pass as faith. People say we must have faith in God; let things take their course and they will come out all right. The church long commended the slothful who let things drift, and called their laziness resignation. But faith feels the certitude of a harvest because it has first diligently plowed and sown and because of the goodness that has ever brought the seed-time and the harvest. Superstitious credulity is not faith. It is more than the foresight that feeds on visions of a future heaven; it is the clear eye that looks keenly at the things of to-day. No truth is the better for being taken on trust; it cannot be possessed until it is known, not on the authority of another but on your own experience. No man ever became a martyr for a truth he received at second hand. Only a first hand faith is a force in the world. It is born of life; it determines life. Your faith forms you. If you do not believe men, how can you be a man? If you do not believe in things better, nobler, purer, how can you move towards them? If at bottom your faith is in things mean, sordid, sensual, base, then thither turns your life, and no extraneous efforts, no badges, buttons, or creeds can change its course. You can measure a man's weight in this world, by the strength and clearness of his convictions. Poor you may be, friendless, alone, weak, unlearned; but all this can be overcome if bright in the heart there burns the unquenchable flame of some great passion, some high faith. Given this fire within them, all the tools shall be found, but without it the finest endowment of brain and body is valueless. Given but some great principle, some purpose that becomes a holy passion, something that leads you, like one of long ago who "steadfastly set His face to go up to Jerusalem," then all power is yours. The man who has faith to remove mountains always finds the picks and the steam shovels somewhere. He takes the tools he has, though they may seem but toys beside his task, and lo! some morning when the dreamers awake the mountain is no longer there. Faith has had her perfect work. It is faith that gives fortitude, faith that gives force. The dreamers of dreams have ever been, after all, the doers of the great deeds. Seeing the things that are not seen is the secret of doing the things that remain to be seen. No worthier word was ever said of the divine Man than that which spoke of Him as the leader and completer of faith. So great a work was possible only with sublime confidence in the glorious possibilities of mankind, only with unshakable assurance that all that was good and true in the universe was working with Him for the good of all. With Him faith was an eye that saw man's hidden good, a hand that grasped the infinite might moving for the best. FEAR AND FAITH To many faith simply means denying the reason and relying on emotion. They have what is called saving faith and are able to feel that the Almighty forgives their wrong-doings, ceasing to be angry with them; their faith being perfect when it takes away fear of punishment. To these faith is that which they pay in the form of credence to whatever is ecclesiastically asserted in exchange for the complaisance of diety [Transcriber's note: deity?]. Those who deny all religion assert that it is founded on fear. There is enough in that assertion to give it the colour of truth. Yet fear of the unseen is but the survival of savagery. Faith founded on fear becomes servile, debasing, superstitious. If religion has no higher motive than that of fear, the trembling and dread before some great omnipotent unknown, it can give the world neither help nor uplift. What is there in God to fear? Is the Lord of life also the foe of our lives? Is the author of a world so fair and lovely, inviting us to joy and inspiring with feelings of pleasure, the foe of happiness? Has He made the world a paradise and planted in man's breast the seeds of kindness, gentleness and sweet thoughts only to glower over His world in hatred and to damn it with dread of Himself? All things that can be known argue the goodness of the unknown. As soon as a man learns to live with nature he loses his fear of forest, beast, and sea. Familiarity breeds confidence, affection and reverence. Only the remote and unfamiliar fill us with dread. The city bred tremble in the woods at night, where the native feels himself amongst well loved friends. In the same manner the fear of the divine, born of unfamiliarity, instead of being an evidence of reverence or of religion, becomes the mark of ignorance and cowardice. Rectitude of conduct, resulting wholly from regulating oneself as under an all-seeing critical eye and in dread of a far-reaching devastating hand, cannot produce enrichment of character. Hatred never gave birth to holiness. The souls that in all ages have lived nearest to things spiritual, that have most enriched the world with thoughts, whose inner visions pierced our outer clouds, seeing something of the glory of the infinite, brought back no pictures of a face austere, of a cruel despot, or of aught for love or truth to fear. True faith instead of being a compromise to allay our fears of unknown ills and calamities, ever has been the fearless, reverent search for the face of the infinite. It does not say: "I believe that God will let me alone because I did those prescribed things"; rather it says: "I cannot be satisfied alone and apart from Him, the source and sole satisfaction of all life." Science with its passion for truth, art with its passion for beauty, ethics with its passion for rightness, are all but parts of true religion, the soul's passion for the infinite heart and mind in which all ideas of truth and beauty take their rise and find their full realization. The soul of man never has ceased to cry out for the living God; the religion of fear has given it no satisfaction. Its followers have been too busy building themselves shelters from the heaven they dread, shelters that become as leaden shields shutting out the eternal tenderness and beneficence. No man ever found the celestial city or its glorious king so long as he regarded his religion as a cyclone cellar. To those who, with eyes of reverence, seek to find the good in all things here, believing that love is better and mightier than hate, that whatever is good, kindly, tender, pure, and ennobling in us, is but the reflection from the glory of the infinite, traces in our dust by which we find our way to Him who inhabits eternity, these, through eyes of faith, have found a presence beyond description or definition. Fear sets afar off a mighty monarch; faith finds near at hand one whom it calls "Father." Fear shrinks from the impending wrath, love rests in the unchanging goodness. Fear imagines a throne and flaming sword; faith has confidence in a better day ever dawning, in the triumph at last of right, in the reality of an incomprehensible love that sings in its joy, soothes in its sorrow, strengthens in its discipline, a life and love nearer and more real than any of the other facts of living. FAITH FOR THE FUTURE You cannot tell much about a man's faith by his willingness to deal in futures without any foundation in fact. And yet no man is ready to face the future unless his heart is nerved by a high and worthy faith. This alone can give strength to look down the coming days and to take up their tasks. None of us can know what these new days hold for us; fear readily conjures up pictures of disaster. But because of certain sublime confidences we hold we banish our fears, shake off our sloth, and gladly step out into the unknown and untrodden country of to-morrow. Faith is the force of all the ages. It accounts for the past; it enters and determines the future. Because certain men in days gone by believed certain things intensely; because they were thrilled by great visions, by glorious ideals, history was wrought out in the forge of their convictions, under the hammer of their wills. No great things are done except by the power of faith, under glowing hopes and compelling convictions. It is her faith in her boy's future that makes the mother willing to suffer, keeps her patient, that buoys up the father in the strife and weariness of life. No man or woman is doing anything that makes the world richer for mere bread and butter; some purpose and vision is behind the worthy work. It is because somehow we believe, no matter how we may phrase the belief, that destiny is behind this strange weaving we call life that we are content to seem to be the shuttles jerked hither and thither. We bear the ills of to-day because we dimly see the glorious goal of the good of all. We do a full day's work only as we see somehow an eternal wage. It makes little difference what creed a man may hold, for that has become almost wholly a matter of philosophical speculation regarding things unknown and often unimportant, but it makes all the difference what measure and quality of faith he has, whether he feels the force of great aspirations and is controlled by eternal principles. It may belong to few of us to be heralded as heroes, and the judgment of history may confer on none the martyr's crown, but the hero's joy and the martyr's glory are in the heart of every one who boldly reaches up to and lives out the highest he conceives, for he will not do that without sacrifice and pain on his side nor without enriching for mankind on the other. The largest faith may be manifest in the lowliest places. When all the work of the ages appears, when the weaving of the centuries is turned with its finished side towards us, we may see that the man who has laid the brick or fed the furnace or the woman who has washed and cooked in the home and tended the little ones, doing these things for love, has shot the most glowing colours into the great fabric. It is not the thing you do so much as the spirit in which you do it that makes it great or small. Faith determines this spirit, for faith is that which fashions the ideal of the one we love, the ideal we serve and for which we joyfully suffer. The prophet whose burning words cannot forget lives by the faith in a vision broad and sweeping; but not less is the faith of the humble toiler who lives each day by the vision of his home and fireside. Nor is this all. It is faith that draws on life's invisible sources of power and refreshing; it is faith that finds inner contact with the invisible. How empty is life if it hold nothing but things; how hungry grows the heart fed only on cold facts. For each day as it comes we need to be able to draw on the deep springs of the water of life, the springs from which our fathers drank and found strength to lay the foundations of our day. Faith is not the blind confidence that, somehow, Providence will send us daily bread. It is the faculty by which the heart eats of the bread of heaven, by which it comes into fellowship with the great and immortal of all ages, by which it walks with Jesus of Nazareth and every spirit like His and learns to read life as love law and see it as leading to eternal good. [The end] GO TO TOP OF SCREEN |