148
The Fundamentals gerous piece of water, in a boat, with a skilled and experi enced boatman. I cross it, not without tremor perhaps, but with faith. Here faith is exercised on a trustworthy and known object, the boatman. But it is exercised regarding what are more or less, to me, uncertain circumstances, the amount of peril, and the way to handle the boat in it. Were there no uncertain circumstances my opinion of the boatman would not be faith, but mere opinion; estimate, not reliance. Our illustration suggests the remark that Faith, as con cerned with our salvation, needs a certain and trustworthy Object, even Jesus Christ. Having Him, we have the right condition for exercising Faith, reliance in the dark, trust in His skill and power on our behalf in unknown or mysterious circumstances. HEBREWS XI : l NOT A DEFINITION. It seems well to remark here on that great sentence, Heb. 11:1, sometimes quoted as a definition of Faith: “Now faith is certainty of things hoped for, proof of things not seen.” If this is a definition, properly speaking, it must negative the simple definition of Faith which we have arrived at above, namely, reliance. For it leads us towards a totally different region of thought, and suggests, what many religious think ers have held, that Faith is as it were a mysterious spiritual sense, a subtle power of touching and feeling the unseen and eternal, a “vision and a faculty divine,” almost a “second- sight” in the soul. We on the contrary maintain that it is always the same thing in itself, whether concerned with com mon or with spiritual things, namely, reliance, reposed on a trustworthy object, and exercised more or less in the dark. The other view would look on Faith (in things spiritual) rather as a faculty in itself than as an attitude towards an Object. The thought is thus more engaged with Faith’s own latent power than with the power and truth of a Promiser. Now on this I remark, first, that the words of Heb. 11:1
Made with FlippingBook flipbook maker