This is not the place to enter on a detailed examination of the essential importance of these great central facts of Christian belief in establishing faith in the unseen, and distinguishing its grasp from the blind clutches of credulity; but a single consideration will suffice at least to awaken a feeling of a wide vista of possibility when we put it thus:  Do we wonder at the spectacle of a righteous man, passing his life in suffering and poverty, seemingly stricken by the Divine hand?—­But is not the case altered when we reflect that the Hand that thus smites is a hand itself pierced with the Cross-nails of a terrible human suffering, undergone solely on man’s account?

It can be proved easily, by exhaustive examples, to be the case, that wherever the finite is brought into contact with the Infinite, that there must be a dead-lock, a leading up successively to two conclusions, one of which is almost, if not quite, contrary to the other.  A very striking instance of this is the question of Predestination and Free-will.  From the finite side, I am conscious that I am a free agent:  I can will to rise up and to lie down.  It is true that my will may be influenced, strongly or feebly, by various means—­by the effect of habit, by the inherited tendency of my constitution, by some present motive of temptation, and so forth:  but the will is there—­the motive-influence or inclining-power is not the will, but that which affects or works on will.  A motive pulls me this way, another pulls me that; but in the end, my will follows one or the other.  I can, then, do as I please.  On the other hand, Infinite Knowledge must know, and have known from all eternity, what I shall do now, and at every moment of my future being:  and for Omnipotence to know from all eternity what will be, is, in our human sense, practically undistinguishable from the thought that the Power has predestined the same; and man cannot of course alter that.  Here, then, by separate lines of thought, we are brought to two opposite and irreconcilable conclusions.  It is so always.  We cannot ourselves imagine how a fixed set of laws and rules can be followed, and yet the best interests of each and every one of God’s creatures be served as truly as if God directly wielded the machinery of nature only for the special benefit of the individual.  The thing is unthinkable to us:  yet directly we reason on the necessarily unlimited capability of a Divine Providence, we are led to the conclusion that it must be possible.  Here then is the province of Faith.[1]

[Footnote 1:  The Scripture clearly recognizes the two opposing lines.  In one place we read, “Thou hast given them a law which shall not be broken;” in another, “All things work together for good to them that love God.”]

It is by Faith, then—­combined with only a limited degree of knowledge, founded on observation and reasoning—­that we understand that “the aeons were constituted by the Word of God, so that the things which are seen were not made of things which do appear” (the phenomenal has its origin in the non-phenomenal).