Those, again, who insist that in religion the willingness is all, forget that it seems no more in our power to believe than it is to love.  We apparently “fall into” the one as we do into the other; we do not choose to believe, we cannot help believing.  And unless a man’s mind is satisfied with the reasonableness of faith, he cannot “make believe.”  Romanes, who certainly wished for fellowship with the Christian God as ardently as any man, confessed:  “Even the simplest act of will in regard to religion—­that of prayer—­has not been performed by me for at least a quarter of a century, simply because it has seemed so impossible to pray, as it were, hypothetically, that much as I have always desired to be able to pray, I cannot will the attempt.”  Christianity has ever laid stress upon its intellectual appeal.  By the manifestation of the truth its missionaries have, from Paul’s day, tried to commend themselves.  We do not hear of “Evidence Societies” among non-Christian faiths.  When the Emperor Julian attempted to restore the ancient paganism, he did not argue for its superior credibility, but contented himself with abusing the creed of Christians and extolling the beauty of the rituals of the religion it had supplanted.  But the propaganda of the gospel of Jesus is invariably one of persuasion, convincing and confirming men’s minds with its truth.

It would be as false, however, to neglect the part a man’s willingness has in his faith.  To believe in the Christian God demands a severe moral effort.  It can never be an easy thing to rely on love as the ultimate wisdom and power in the universe.  “The will to believe,” if not everything, is all but everything, in predisposing us to listen to the arguments of the faith and in rendering us inflammable to its kindling emotions.

But no man can be truly religious who is not in communion with God with “as much as in him is.”  Somebody has finely said that it does not take much of a man to be a Christian, but it takes all there is of him.  An early African Christian, Arnobius, tells us that we must “cling to God with all our senses, so to speak.”  And Thomas Carlyle gave us a picture of the ideal believer when he wrote of his father that “he was religious with the consent of his whole faculties.”  It is faith’s ability to engross a man’s entire self, going down to the very roots of his being, that renders it indestructible.  It can say of those who seek to undermine it, as Hamlet said of his enemies: 

    It shall go hard,
  But I will delve one yard below their mines.

As an experience, God is a discovery which each must make for himself.  Religion comes to us as an inheritance; and at the outset we can no more distinguish the voice of God from the voices of men we respect, than the boy Samuel could distinguish the voice of Jehovah from that of Eli.  But we gradually learn to “possess our possession,” to respond to our own highest inspirations, whether or not they