It is only when circumstances force a man to feel that a God would be desirable that he will risk himself to yield to his highest inspirations, and give God the chance to disclose Himself to him.  It is a case of nothing venture, nothing have.  Faith is always a going out whither we know not, but in each venture we accumulate experience and gradually come to “know Whom we have believed.”  Without the initial eagerness for God which opens the door and sends us out we remain debarred from ever knowing.  As the Theologia Germanica puts it, “We are speaking of a certain Truth which it is possible to know by experience, but which ye must believe in before ye know.”

The capacity for religious experience can be cultivated.  Faith, like an ear for music or taste in literature, is a developable instinct.  It grows by contagious contact with fellow believers; as “the sight of lovers feedeth those in love,” the man of faith is nourished by fellowship with the believing Church.  It is increased by familiarity with fuller and richer experiences of God; continuous study of the Bible leads men into its varied and profound communion with the Most High.  It is enlarged by private and social worship; prayer and hymn and message were born in vital experiences, and they reproduce the experience.  Browning, in characteristic verse, describes the effect of the service upon the worshippers in Zion Chapel Meeting: 

    These people have really felt, no doubt,
  A something, the motion they style the Call of them;
    And this is their method of bringing about,
  By a mechanism of words and tones,
  (So many texts in so many groans)
  A sort of reviving and reproducing,
    More or less perfectly (who can tell?),
  The mood itself, which strengthens by using.

An unexpressed faith dies of suffocation, while utterance intensifies experience and leads to fresh expression; religion, like Shelley’s Skylark, “singing still doth soar, and soaring ever singeth.”  Above all, the instinct for the Unseen is developed by exercise; obedience to our heavenly visions sharpens the eyes of the heart.  Charles Lamb pictures his sister and himself “with a taste for religion rather than a strong religious habit.”  Such people exclude themselves from the power and peace, the limitless enrichment, of conscious friendship with the living God.

Indeed it is not conceivable that a man can have really tasted fellowship with the Most High without acquiring an appetite for more of Him.  The same psalmist who speaks of his soul as satisfied in God, at once goes on, “My soul followeth hard after Thee.”  He who does not become a confirmed seeker for God is not likely ever to have truly found Him.  There is something essentially irreligious in the attitude portrayed in the biography of Horace Walpole, who, when Queen Caroline tried to induce him to read Butler’s Analogy, told her that his religion was fixed, and that he had no desire either to change or to improve it.  A believer’s heart is fixed; his soul is stayed on God; but his experience is constantly expanding.