And now reason once again confronts us with the Sphinx-like question—­the Sphinx, in effect, is reason—­Does God exist?  This eternal and eternalizing person who gives meaning—­and I will add, a human meaning, for there is none other—­to the Universe, is it a substantial something, existing independently of our consciousness, independently of our desire?  Here we arrive at the insoluble, and it is best that it should be so.  Let it suffice for reason that it cannot prove the impossibility of His existence.

To believe in God is to long for His existence and, further, it is to act as if He existed; it is to live by this longing and to make it the inner spring of our action.  This longing or hunger for divinity begets hope, hope begets faith, and faith and hope beget charity.  Of this divine longing is born our sense of beauty, of finality, of goodness.

Let us see how this may be.

FOOTNOTES: 

[38] Lecture I., p. 36.  London, 1895, Black.

[39] No quiero acordarme, a phrase that is always associated in Spanish literature with the opening sentence of Don Quijote:  En an lugar de la Mancha de cuyo nombre no quiero acordarme.—­J.E.C.F.

[40] W. Hermann, Christlich systematische Dogmatik, in the volume entitled Systematische christliche Religion.  Die Kultur der Gegenwart series, published by P. Hinneberg.

[41] Dieu a fait l’homme a son image, mais l’homme le lui a bien rendu, Voltaire.—­J.E.C.F.

[42] Vivir un mundo.

[43] Sermons, by the Rev. Frederick W. Robertson.  First series, sermon iii., “Jacob’s Wrestling.”  Kegan Paul, Trench, Truebuer and Co., London, 1898.

IX

FAITH, HOPE, AND CHARITY

Sanctius ac reverentius visum de actis deorum credere quam scire.—­TACITUS:  Germania, 34.

The road that leads us to the living God, the God of the heart, and that leads us back to Him when we have left Him for the lifeless God of logic, is the road of faith, not of rational or mathematical conviction.

And what is faith?

This is the question propounded in the Catechism of Christian Doctrine that was taught us at school, and the answer runs:  Faith is believing what we have not seen.

This, in an essay written some twelve years ago, I amended as follows:  “Believing what we have not seen, no! but creating what we do not see.”  And I have already told you that believing in God is, in the first instance at least, wishing that God may be, longing for the existence of God.

The theological virtue of faith, according to the Apostle Paul, whose definition serves as the basis of the traditional Christian disquisitions upon it, is “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen,” elpizomevon hupostasis, pragmaton elegchos ou blepomenon (Heb. xi. 1).