How shall we test the validity of the inference we draw from our experience?

One test is the satisfaction that it gives to all elements in our complex personality.  One part of us may be deceived, but that which contents the entire man is not likely to be unreal.  Arthur Hallam declared that he liked Christianity because “it fits into all the folds of one’s nature.”  Further, this satisfaction is not temporary but persistent.  In childhood, in youth, in middle age, at the gates of death, in countless experiences, the God we infer from our spirit’s reactions to Him meets and answers our changing needs.  Matthew Arnold writes:  “Jesus Christ and His precepts are found to hit the moral experience of mankind; to hit it in the critical points; to hit it lastingly; and, when doubts are thrown upon their really hitting it, then to come out stronger than ever.”  Unless we are to distrust ourselves altogether, that which appeals to our minds as reasonable, to our hearts as lovable, to our consciences as commanding, and to our souls as adorable, can hardly be “such stuff as dreams are made on.”

Nor are we looking at ourselves alone.  We are confirmed by the completer experiences of the generations who have preceded us.  “They looked unto Him and were radiant.”  Those thousands of beautiful and holy faces in each century, “lit with their loving and aflame with God,” can scarcely have been gazing on light kindled solely by their own imaginations.

  And all their minds transfigured so together,
  More witnesseth than fancy’s images,
  And grows to something of great constancy.

Religion has written its witness into the world’s history, and we can appeal to an eloquent past.

  Look at the generations of old, and see: 
  Who did ever put his trust in the Lord, and was ashamed? 
  Or who did abide in His fear, and was forsaken? 
  Or who did call upon Him, and He despised him?

And its witness comes from today as certainly, and more widely, than from any believing yesterday.  Ten thousand times ten thousand, and thousands of thousands, out of every kindred and tongue and nation, throughout the world, testify what the God and Father of Jesus Christ means to them.  Are we all self-deceived?

Nor are we limited to the experiences of those who at best impress us as partially religious.  For the final confirmation of our faith we look to the ideal Believer, who not only has an ampler religious experience than any other, but also possesses more power to create faith, and to take us farther into the Unseen; we look unto Jesus, the Author and Perfecter of faith.  His life and death, His character and influence, remain the world’s most priceless possession.  Was the faith which produced them, the faith which inspired Him, an hallucination?  There is contained in that life more proof that God is, than in all other approach of God to man, or of man to God.