Faith does not require authority; it confers it.  To those who face the Sistine Madonna, in the room in the Dresden Gallery where it hangs in solitary eminence, it is not the testimony of tradition, nor of the thousands of its living admirers throughout the world, that renders it beautiful; it makes its own irresistible impression.  There are similar moments for the soul when some word, or character, or event, or suggestion within ourselves, bows us in admiration before the incomparably Fair, in shame before the unapproachably Holy, in acceptance before the indisputably True, in adoration before the supremely Loving—­moments when “belief overmasters doubt, and we know that we know.”  At such times the sense of personal intercourse is so vivid that the believer cannot question that he stands face to face with the living God.

Such moments, however, are not abiding; and in the reaction that follows them the mind will question whether it has not been the victim of illusion.  John Bunyan owns:  “Though God has visited my soul with never so blessed a discovery of Himself, yet afterwards I have been in my spirit so filled with darkness, that I could not so much as once conceive what that God and that comfort was with which I had been refreshed.”  Many a Christian today knows the inspiration and calm and reinforcement of religion, only to find himself wondering whether these may not come from an idea in his own head, and not from a personal God.  May we not be in a subjective prison from whose walls words and prayers rebound without outer effect?

How far may we trust our experience as validating the inferences we draw from it?  The Christian thought of God is after all no more than an hypothesis propounded to account for the Christian life.  May not our experiences be accounted for in some other way?  We must distinguish between the adequacy of our thought of God and the fact that there is a God more or less like our thought of Him.  Our experience can never guarantee the entire correctness of our concept of Deity; a child experiences parental love without knowing accurately who its parents are—­their characters, position, abilities, etc.  But the child’s experience of loving care convinces the child that he possesses living parents.  Is it likely that, were God a mere fancy, a fancy which we should promptly discard if we knew it as such, our experience could be what it is?  An explanation of an experience, which would destroy that experience, is scarcely to be received as an explanation.  Religion is incomparably valuable, and to account for it as self-hypnosis would end it for us as a piece of folly.  Can life’s highest values be so dealt with?  Moreover, we cannot settle down comfortably in unbelief; just when we feel most sure that there is no God, something unsettles us, and gives us an uncanny feeling that after all He is, and is seeking us.  We find ourselves responding, and once more we are strengthened, encouraged, uplifted.  Can a mere imagination compass such results?