Truth Passes Through Faith into Power

“Not being mixed with faith.” — HEBREWS iv. 2.

THERE is always a pathetic interest, made up of sadness and hope together, in the sight of any good thing which fails of power and of its fullest life, be cause it is a fragment and does not meet the other part which is needed to complete the whole. A seed that lies upon the rock and finds no ground; an instrument that stands complete in all its mechanism but with no player’s hand to call its music out; a man who might do brave and useful things under the summons of a friend’s enthusiasm, but goes through life alone; a nature with fine and noble qualities that need the complement of other qualities, which the man lacks, to make a fruitful life; a country rich in certain elements of character, such as energy, hopefulness, self-confidence, but wanting just that profound conscientiousness, that scrupulous integrity, which should be the rudder to these broad and eager sails; a Church devout without thoughtfulness, or liberal without deep convictions, — where would the long list of illustrations end?

Everywhere the most pathetic sights are these in which possibility and failure meet. Indeed, herein lies the general pathos which belongs to the great human history as a whole, and to each man’s single life. Not with the quiet satisfaction with which we look at inanimate nature or at the brutes, not with the sublime delight with which we think of God, can our thoughts rest on man, the meeting-place of such evident power and such no less evident deficiency.

The sadness does not disappear but rather increases as we lift up our eyes to the men who must be held to have succeeded best. From their height of success only a new range of unfulfilled possibility is opened. And the hope never wholly dies out, even for those who fail the worst. We follow them to their graves, almost looking to see them start from the dead and do the thing which they have always been upon the brink of doing. We dare to dream for them of another life when these powers, which the man has carried so long powerless, shall be mixed with the capacity or the motive which they have missed, and the life that never has been lived shall be at last begun.

One of these failures is described in the words of the text. The whole passage, as it stands in the Epistle, is this: “The word preached did not profit them, not being mixed with faith in them that heard it,” — the mixture of faith which truth needs in order that it may become profitable power. I think that no one reads the words and does not feel his notion of what faith is enlarge. Evidently it is something more than mere assent, something more than simple acknowledgment that the truth is true. The essential relations between truth and the nature of man are evidently comprehended in their whole completeness. All that the nature of man might do to truth, all the welcome that it might extend, all the cordial and manifold relationships into which it might have entered with the word that was preached unto it, — all this is in the writer’s mind. It is the failure of all this together that he laments. All this is summed up in the faith which the truth has not found. Faith, as he talks about it here, seems to be simply the full welcome which the human soul can give to anything with which it has essential and natural relationship. It will vary for everything according to that thing’s nature, as the hand will shape itself differently according to the different shapes of the things it has to grasp. And faith is simply the soul’s grasp, a larger or a smaller act according to the largeness or smallness of the object grasped; of one size for a fact, of another for a friend, of another for a principle, but always the soul’s grasp, the entrance of the soul into its true and healthy relationship to the object which is offered to it.

It is in the fact that there are such essential relationships between man and the things which fill the world about him that the value and beauty of his existence lie. The application of any object to its faculty, the opening of the faculty to its object, — that is what makes the richness of all life. In the open faculty the object finds its true mixture, and its higher life begins. You hold a bit of sweet food to the eye and it finds no welcome there. It is not “mixed with faith.” Only when it touches the tongue it opens its possibilities, and becomes, first, pleasure, and then, nourishment. You play sweet music to the taste, and the taste cannot hear it. It makes no entrance. It is “not mixed with faith.” For faith is another word for welcome, — the cordial acceptance of any presence into the inmost chambers of our human nature where that particular presence has a right to go.

How easy it is to carry this up from the physical structure to much higher things! You bring a true, rich friend, and set him before a sordid man, a man of selfish ambitions, and how powerless he is! He makes no entrance. He is “not mixed with faith.” You take a great motive, one that has rung like a bugle in the ears of the noblest men that have ever lived, and you make it sound in the ears of a dull boy who has no ambition to be noble, and why is it that it falls dead? Because it is “not mixed with faith.” It finds no answering manhood in this boy with which it may unite and make a noble man. Truth and a soul that is ready for truth meet like the fuel and the flame. They know each other. It is like the Lord’s Parable of the Sower. The good seed finds the ground ready, and out of their quick union comes the plant that by and by crowns itself with the flower. The seed upon the stony ground comes to nothing, because it is “not mixed with faith.”

At the bottom of our whole conception of what faith is, must lie its personality. There are some things which I can have no faith in, while you may take them into your very heart of hearts. There are other things which I could not live without, but to which you give no welcome. One loves to think of the quick combinations that are going on all around us. Everywhere truths, objects, characters, are falling into men’s lives, and, finding faith there, are entering on their own higher lives as convictions, powers, and inspirations. In one man one truth finds its waiting faith, and in another man another. It is the sublime prerogative of God’s Fatherhood that He alone can ask for faith in every man. Only He can stand and look over the worldful of His children, and cry to every one, “My son, give me thy heart,” and know that in every heart there ought to be a welcome for Him to its very inmost chambers.

As soon as we understand what the faith is which any object or truth must find and mix itself with before it can put on its fullest life and power, then, I think, we are impressed with this, — that men are always making attempts which never can succeed to give to objects and truths a value which in them selves they never can possess, which can only come to them as they are taken home by faith into the characters of men. We hear men talk about the progress of our country, and by and by we find that they mean the increase of its wealth, the development of its resources, the opening of its communications, the growth of its commerce. These do not make a country great; they are powerless until they are mixed with faith, until they give themselves to the reinforcement of the human qualities of which any real national life, like any real personal life, is made, and make the nation more generous, more upright, and more free. They may do that. It is in the power of a nation, as of a man, to grow greater by every added dollar of its wealth; but a dollar is powerless until it mixes itself with faith and passes into character.

And so of far more spiritual things than dollars. You say, “How headlong my boy is! Let me give him a wise friend, and so he shall get wisdom.” You say, “Here is my brother who has been frivolous. Behold, a blessed sorrow is gathering about him, and out of the darkness he will come with a sober heart.” You say, “This man is coarse and brutish; let me set him among fine things, and he will become delicate and gentle.” You say, “This selfish creature has not cared for his country in what seemed her soft and easy days, but let the storm come, let the war burst out, or the critical election, big with disgrace or honor, rise up like a sudden rock out of the calm sea, and patriotism will gather at his heart, and set his brain to lofty thoughts, and strengthen his arm for heroic deeds.” Forever the same anticipations from mere circumstances! the same trust in mere emergencies, in facts, events, and things; and forever the same disappointment! forever the same reiterated answer from all experience, like the perpetually repeated answer that the moaning rocks give to the querulous tide, which is always creeping back to hear it once again, — the answer that no crisis, no event, no fact, no person, is of real value to the soul of any man, unless it really gets into that soul, compels or wins its welcome, and passes, by the mixture of faith, into character. So, and so only, does a wise friend make your boy wise, or sorrow make your brother noble, or fine and gentle circumstances make the coarse man fine, or the need of his country make the selfish man a patriot.

Now, all this is peculiarly true with reference to religion. Think how it runs through the Bible. Remember the course of the sacred History which is a perpetual parable of that other no less sacred history which is in the life of every religious man. The story of the Bible is simply the record of God, the great eternal Circumstance, the vast Surrounding that always encompasses the life of man; constantly offering Himself to that life and testing its capacity to receive Him. At the beginning comes the mysterious story of Genesis. The Creator walks with the new Humanity among the trees of the New Garden. But the Humanity, as yet unripened by experience, untrained by suffering, unenlightened by the discovery of its own essential feebleness, self-confident and superficial, cannot take the Divine society into its deepest heart. Adam and Eve — the young and untrained Earth and Life — take God into the society of their happiness, but they do not claim Him in the inmost chambers, into the government of their wills and the consolation of their sorrow.

At the other end of the Bible is the New Jerusalem, and there what have we? Man rich in all the fearful and beautiful experience of life; humanity with all its history of grief and comfort, of sin and redemption; humanity mellowed, softened, humbled, deepened by all the experience of the long, slow day in which the ages of human history have been the creeping hours. And lo! in this beaten and ripened humanity the doors are all wide open. Even into the deepest chambers enters the ever-present God, and finds in each chamber a new faith with which He mixes Himself and becomes the soul’s life. “The Throne of God and of the Lamb shall be in it, and His servants shall serve Him, and His name shall be in their foreheads,” Between the two ends of the Bible, there is the story of God’s perpetual offer of Himself to the soul of man, and of His entrance into it just so far as He finds faith to welcome Him. Noah, Abraham, Moses, David, the Prophets, John the Baptist, Nicodemus, John the disciple, Paul, — each marks some access of the Divine Presence to our human life. And each bears witness how impossible it is even for God to enter into a humanity that has not faith, to enter any humanity farther than that humanity has faith to take His blessed Presence in.

There is indeed another truth which always mingles with this, and softens the harshness which would be in it if it stood alone. That other truth is that every approach of God to man has a true tendency to create the faith, without which the approach can never become a real entrance. As the face of your unforgotten friend, coming towards you, reclaims you for himself, and has a true power to make you give that welcome to his love which still, at the last, nothing but your own willing love can give, and without which he, love you as warmly as he may, cannot enter; so the first truth of religion always must be that there is such an essential and original belonging between God and man, that as God comes to man He makes, as far as any power outside man’s own will can make, the faith which is to be His welcome. If this were not truth, life would be very dark and hope would be a mockery.

Yet, still the truth remains that only into faith, only into a fitness and receptivity of soul, can even God come with His blessed Presence. And if it is true of God, it is true certainly of every truth of God, and of all the forms of sacred influence which His Presence takes. They cannot enter the real life of a man until they are “mixed with faith.” Just think how this convicts of superficialness a very large part of our labor and expectation for the extension of religion and the benefit of man. We put confidence in our organizations. “Let us plant our church in this remote village,” we say. “Let our beloved services be heard among those unfamiliar scenes. Let our ministry be known in the far West, and so men shall be saved.” We have not too much confidence, but the wrong kind of confidence, in the objective truth: “Let this, which I know is verity, come to this bad man’s life, and he must turn.”

There is all about us this faith in the efficacy of ideas over character. The orthodox man believes that if you could silence all dissent from the old venerated creed, the world would shine with holiness. The unbeliever thinks that if you could tear the old creeds out of the belief of men, the crushed, creed-ridden heart of man would spring up and enthusiastically claim its privilege of goodness. How like it all sounds to the cry which we hear in the Parable, coming forth from the still unenlightened ruin of a wasted life: “Nay, Father Abraham, but if one went unto them from the dead, they will repent.” Ideas are mighty. There is no real strength in the world that has not an idea at its heart. To declare true ideas, to speak the truth to men, is the noblest work that any man can covet or try to do. To attempt to gain power over men which shall not be really the power of an idea is poor, ignoble work. But yet it is none the less certain that no man does really tell the truth to other men, who does not always go about remembering that truth is not profitable till it is mixed with faith, that the final power of acceptance or rejection lies in the soul. It is the forgetfulness of this which has made the useless teachers of every kind — the teachers from whom the scholars have gone away unfed, the faithful but fruitless ministers, the dreary books, the disappointed, unsuccessful reformers.

I have been talking thus far as if a truth which did not meet with faith simply remained inoperative. “The word preached did not profit them,” writes the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews, “not being mixed with faith.” But we must go farther than this. The mind of man is far too delicate and sensitive for anything unappropriated, and not made a part of itself, to lie in it without doing it harm. Everything that is there must enter into some relation with the humanity which holds it; and if the relation be not one of fellowship and help, it will certainly be hostile and injurious. How universal is this necessity! The person whom a man has studied and understood, but has not learned to sympathize with and love, becomes an irritation, — all the more irritating as his life is pressed more closely on the unsympathetic and unloving heart. His motives are distorted. His excellencies excite jealousy, instead of admiration. His failings are exaggerated, and make the observer glad instead of sorry.

And so it is with books. The book which you have studied, but whose heart you have not taken into your heart, makes you not a wise man but a pedant. And so it is with institutions. The government under which you live, but with whose ideas you are not in loyal sympathy, chafes and worries you, and makes you often all the more rebellious in your heart, the more punctiliously obedient you are in outward action. And so, especially, it is in all that pertains to religion. What is the root and source of bigotry, and of that which goes with bigotry, — partisanship, — the desire that a belief — whether the belief be true or false — should prosper and prevail, not because it is true, but because it is ours?

Is not the real reason of these morbid substitutes for healthy belief always this — that truth has been received, but not “mixed with faith,” not deeply taken into the very nature of the man who has received it? Take any truth, the truth for instance of the Lord’s Incarnation. Let it be simply a proved fact to a man, and how easily he comes to hate or to pity the men who do not hold it, how ready he is to seek out and magnify the shades of difference in the statements which men make of it who hold the great truth along with him! But let that same truth be “mixed with faith,” let it enter into those depths of a man’s nature where it is capable of going, let it awaken in him the deep, dear sense of the unutterable Love of God, let it reveal to him his human dignity, his human responsibility, his human need, and then how impossible it will be for him to be a bigot! How all men, believers and unbelievers alike, will be seen by him within the glory of his great truth! How he will pity the men who do not know it! How he will welcome and rejoice in any half-knowledge of it, any guess that he sees men making at it, though it be very blind and crude! How he will have fellowship with any man who really does believe it, though the form in which that man has conceived and stated it may be different from his own! It is possible for us to believe the same everlasting truths which the bigots and the persecutors believed, and yet escape their bigotry and intolerance. But we must do it, not by believing less deeply, but by believing more deeply than they did. The path to charity lies not away from faith, but deep on into the very heart of faith; for only there true, reasonable, permanent charity abides.

How heavily all this pressed upon the heart of Jesus Christ! He sat with His disciples at the quiet Passover, and His thoughts ran back over all the multitudes to whom His words had come, and in whom they had found no faith. “If I had not come and spoken unto them,” He said, “they had not had sin.” He looked the Pharisees in the face as if He pitied them so while He rebuked them that He would almost, if He could, have plucked away again the truth which He had taught them. “If ye were blind,” He cried, “ye should have no sin.” How He must look at some of us! The sorrow with which He wept over Jerusalem must be forever newly wakened in His heart. He sees men believing all wrong, because they do not believe enough. He sees us taking with one part of our nature what was meant for the whole, taking with our wills what our affections ought to take, taking with slavish fear what we ought to embrace with glowing love. Can we not almost hear Him say, as if He pitied us for the very richness of the truth which He has offered us, the very richness with which He has offered us Himself, the old sad words, “How is it that ye have no faith?”

The whole of the life and teaching of Jesus Christ is full of emphasis laid on the value of the soul and its personal life. Two words describe the work that He is always declaring that He has come to do for men — revelation and regeneration, — the opening of divine truth and power to men, and the making of men fit for the divine truth and power; truth for men and men for the truth. He says to Nathaniel, “Thou shalt see greater things than these”; He says to Nicodemus, “Ye must be born again”; and He declares that He Himself is the force by which both shall be accomplished when He cries in the Temple, “I am come a Light into the world, that he that believeth on me should not abide in darkness.”

As we read the story of the men who have tried to help the world, we see the divine supremacy of Christ in the proportion which these two offers, these two promises, — revelation and regeneration, — always held to one another in His mind and teaching. There have been many teachers whose one idea was revelation, and their truth has passed away and left men unlifted, unaroused. There have been other teachers whose one idea was regeneration, the making of new men; but they brought no truth which could at once feed and fasten the character which they tried to inspire. Jesus Christ comes with both. And yet always the new manhood is the great, supreme thing. Revelation always demands regeneration, and then its whole work is to complete it and to make it permanent.

Ah, my dear friends, we have not caught at all the real heart of the Saviour unless we hear perpetually in everything He does and says the beating of that absorbing sense of the infinite importance of the soul and its condition. “Keep thy heart with all diligence, for out of it are the issues of life “: those calm and philosophic words of Solomon turn in the soul of Christ into an eager, vivid, passionate anxiety over the spiritual readiness of the men before whom He stood with His untold blessings, — “Let your loins be girt about, and your lights burning, and ye yourselves like unto men that wait for their Lord. Blessed are those servants whom the Lord when he cometh shall find watching.” Truth cannot feed the soul, nor power strengthen it, nor love soften it, nor mercy save it, unless the soul is ready to welcome it and “mix it with faith.”

It is good for us, I think, to believe that many and many a man to whom the doctrines of Christianity are very dark, does yet catch from the whole aspect of Christ, and from all He says, this great and deep conviction of the value of the soul, and of the infinite importance that it should be kept pure and true and ready. That is the beginning of the healthiest process of the new life. To the soul so guarded and so open all truth shall come. For before the faith which receives truth and turns it into power, there must come the other faith which knows that the soul is made for truth and waits expectant of its coming. And when this deepest and first faith is really present, the other sooner or later cannot fail to come.

Think for a few moments of the rich light that this truth on which we have been dwelling — the truth of the dependence of everything upon the central soul of man and its condition — throws upon two or three subjects which are often before our minds. Just see how vast a future it opens to humanity. We think sometimes that we have come in sight of the end of progress, that we live where we can at least foresee an exhausted world. Our ships have sailed the sphere around. Our curiosity has searched to the roots of the mountains and swept the bottoms of the seas. Men have played every role before us which imagination and ambition could suggest. What can there be before the ages which are to come when we are gone but endless reiteration of old things? Is not the interest of life almost used up?” But no! “this truth declares; “the interest of life is not in the things that happen, but in the men who see.” If man be capable of perpetual renewal by ever-increasing faith, then to the ever-new man the old world shall be forever new. It will not need strange things. The things that we call common, the things that have been long familiar, the things which have been, and have been done, over and over since the world began, will shine forever with new light. There must be a limit to the wonders that this world has to show, the stories that it has to tell; but the relations which may exist between this world and the soul of man ever growing in receptive faith are practically without limit; and so the everlasting interest of life, the perpetual progress of humanity, are sure.

Consider also what a light this throws upon the life which many a fellow-man is living now close by our side. How much richer than we can begin to know the world must be to our brother who has a faith which we have not. According to our faith, so is the world to each of us. I dare to give my pity to some man who seems to me to live a meagre life. How few things happen in his days! How little light there is in his dark house! How dull the voices are that break his silence! But who am

I that I should give him pity? Let me know that it is not what he has but what he is that makes the poverty or richness of his life. It may well be that, while I pity him, his deeper faith is seeing visions and hearing music in familiar things of which I have no dream. The world is more to every true, unselfish man when he knows that his limited perception is no measure of its wealth, but that the deeper souls are all the time finding it rich beyond all that he has imagined.

And yet again, think of the same truth as it gives us some light upon the everlasting life, the life beyond the grave. The Revelation tells us of golden streets and gates of pearl. It tells us also of beings who shall walk in them with a precious and mystic name written on their foreheads. Let us be sure that the new name in the forehead is what makes the reality of Heaven far more than the gold under the feet. The new circumstances shall be much, but the new man shall be more! Only by knowing that can we be truly getting ready for Heaven here. We can do nothing now to build the streets and gates, but by God’s grace we can do much, very much, now, to begin to become the men and women to whom Heaven shall one day be possible. Then Heaven, when it comes, will not be strange. Only a deepening of the faith, by which we sought it, shall receive and absorb and grow in and by its richness forever and forever.

Have you faith, my friends? Ask yourselves in the sight of God, and pray to Him to give it to you

if you have it not, and pray to Him to increase it if you have it, for, just as far as you have it, everything is yours, — this world and its richness, the world eternal with its promises, Christ Jesus with His measureless culture and His satisfying Love! May we all grow in Faith!