If learning cannot give faith, neither can it alone preserve it.  Learned men, pillars of the Church have fallen away.  Pride, you will say.  Yes, of course, pride is the cause of all evil.  But we have all our share of it.  If it works less havoc in some than in others, that is because pride is or is not kept within bounds.  It is necessarily fatal to faith only when it is not controlled by prayer and the helps of practical religion.  God alone can preserve our faith.  He will do it only at our solicitation.

If, therefore, some have not succeeded in keeping the demon of pride under restraint, it is because they refused to consider their faith a pure gift of God that cannot be safely guarded without God’s grace; or they forgot that God’s grace is assured to no man who does not pray.  The man who thinks he is all-sufficient unto himself in matters of religion, as in all other matters, is in danger of being brought to a sense of his own nothingness in a manner not calculated to be agreeable.  No man who practised humble prayer ever lost hi& faith, or ever can; for to him grace is assured.

And since faith is nothing if not practical, since it is a habit, it follows that irreligion, neglect to practise what we believe will destroy that habit.  People who neglect their duty often complain that they have no taste for religion, cannot get interested, find no consolation therein.  This justifies further neglect.  They make a pretence to seek the cause.  The cause is lack of faith; the fires of God’s grace are burning low in their souls.  They will soon go out unless they are furnished with fuel in the shape of good, solid, practical religion.  That is their only salvation.  Ignorance, supplemented by lack of prayer and practice, goes a long way in the destruction of faith in any soul, for two essentials are deficient.

Disorder, too, is responsible for the loss of much faith.  Luther and Henry might have retained their faith in spite of their pride, but they were lewd, and avaricious; and there is small indulgence for such within the Church.  Not but that we are all human, and sinners are the objects of the Church’s greatest solicitude; but within her pale no man, be he king or genius, can sit down and feast his passions and expect her to wink at it and call it by another name than its own.  The law of God and of the Church is a thorn in the flesh of the vicious man.  The authority of the Church is a sword of Damocles held perpetually over his head—­until it is removed.  Many a one denies God in a moment of sin in order to take the sting of remorse out of it.  One gets tired of the importunities of religion that tell us not to sin, to confess if we do sin.