The other test of the correctness of our inference drawn from our religious experience is its practical value, the way in which it works in life.  “He that willeth to do His will shall know.”  Coleridge bursts out indignantly:  “‘Evidences of Christianity’!  I am weary of the word.  Make a man feel the want of it; rouse him, if you can, to the self-knowledge of the need of it; and you may safely trust it to its own evidence.”  Religion approaches men saying, “O taste and see that the Lord is good.”  He cannot be good unless He is.  A fancied Deity, an invention however beautiful of men’s brain, supposed to be a living Being, cannot be a blessing, but, like every other falsehood, a curse.  If our religion is a stained glass window we color to hide the void beyond, then in the name of things as they are, whether they have a God or not, let us smash the deceiving glass, and face the darkness or the daylight outside.  “Religion is nothing unless it is true,” and its workableness is the test of its truth.  Behind the accepted hypotheses of science lie countless experiments; and anyone who questions an hypothesis is simply bidden repeat the experiment and convince himself.  Behind the fundamental conviction of Christians are generations of believers who have tried it and proved it.  The God and Father of Jesus is a tested hypothesis; and he who questions must experiment, and let God convince him.  To commit one’s self to God in Christ and be redeemed from most real sins—­turned from selfishness to love, from slavery to freedom; to trust Him in most real difficulties and perplexities, and find one’s self empowered and enlightened;—­is to discover that faith works, and works gloriously.  A man’s idea of God may be, and cannot but be, inadequate; but it corresponds not to nothing existent, but to Someone most alive.  That which comes to us through the idea is witness of the Reality behind it.

Nor are we confined to the witness of our personal discoveries.  There is a social attestation of the workableness of faith.  The surest way of establishing the worth of our religious experience is to share it with another; the strongest confirmation of the objective existence of Him with whom we have to do is to lead another to see Him.  The most effective defender of the faith is the missionary.  “It requires,” as David Livingstone said, “perpetual propagation to attest its genuineness.”  Not they who sit and study and discuss it, however cleverly and learnedly, discover its truth; but they who spend and are spent in attempting to bring a whole world to know the redeeming love of One who is, and who rewards with indubitable sonship with Himself those who prove wholeheartedly loyal.

For our final assurance we appeal confidently to the future.  The glory of the Lord will only be fully revealed when all flesh see it together.  But with personal certainty, based on our own experience, corroborated by the testimony of all the saints, we both wait hopefully and work tirelessly for the day when our God through Christ shall be all in all.