You will see at a glance that this sort of a thing is fatal to the sense of God in the soul; it has for its first, direct and immediate effect to weaken little by little the faith until it finally kills it altogether.  Sloth is a microbe.  It creeps into the soul, sucks in its substance and causes a spiritual consumption.  This is neither an acute nor a violent malady, but it consumes the patient, dries him up, wears him out, till life goes out like a lamp without oil.

CHAPTER XVII.  WHAT WE BELIEVE.

Our first duty to God, and the first obligation imposed upon us by the First Commandment is Faith, or belief in God—­we must know Him.

Belief is solely a manner of knowing.  It is one way of apprehending, or getting possession of, a truth.  There are other ways of acquiring knowledge; by the senses, for instance, seeing, hearing, etc., and by our intelligence or reason.  When truth comes to us through the senses, it is called experience; if the reason presents it, it is called science; if we use the faculty of the soul known as faith, it is belief.

You will observe that belief, experience and science have one and the same object, namely, truth.  These differ only in the manner of apprehending truth.  Belief relies on the testimony of others; experience, on the testimony of the senses; science, on that of the reason.  What I believe, I get from others; what I experience or understand, I owe to my individual self.  I neither believe nor understand that Hartford exists—­I see it.  I neither understand nor see that Rome exists—­I believe it.  I neither see nor believe that two parallel lines will never meet—­I reason it out, I understand it.

Now it is beside the question here to object that belief, or what we believe, may or may not be true.  Neither is all that we see, nor all that our reason produces, true.  Human experience and human reason, like all things human, may err.  Here we simply remark that truth is the object of our belief, as it is the object of our experience and of understanding.  We shall later see that if human belief may err, faith or divine belief cannot mislead us, cannot be false.

Neither is it in order here to contend that belief, of its very nature, is something uncertain, that it is synonymous of opinion; or if it supposes a judgment, that judgment is “formidolose,” liable at any moment to be changed or contradicted.  The testimony of the senses and of reason does not always carry certain conviction.  We may or may not be satisfied with the evidence of human belief.  As for the divine, or faith, it is certain, or it is not at all; and who would not be satisfied with the guarantee offered by the Word of God!

And the truths we believe are those revealed by God, received by us through a double agency, the written and the oral word, known as Scripture and Tradition.  Scripture is contained in the two Testaments; Tradition is found in the bosom, the life of the Church of Christ, in the constant and universal teachings of that Church.