Therefore the man who will believe nothing but what can be demonstrated to him, will deny at last the obligation of duty in obedience to his sceptical intellect, just as he began with denying the existence of God. How does he get out of this great difficulty? By calling up the instinct of faith. He wills to believe that he is something more than a bundle of material elements, that the conscience in his soul is something supreme and divine, that the man in him is something above the animal; and by an exercise of faith in his own higher and better self, he silences the eternal _why_ of the sceptical intellect, the serpent more subtile than any other beast of the field, which if it had its way would make man a beast.
There is only one more question to which I have to call your attention. Having shown you that the sceptical intellect is not the only judge, having shown you that there are domains of human knowledge and human life into which, if it comes at all, it must come as the servant and not as the master; having shown you that scepticism is really nothing else than the intrusion of the mere understanding into the province of the soul and the spirit, it remains to ask, Is religion, is Christianity, one of those subjects on which the understanding is not to be the only judge, but on which the spirit and soul and heart of man have something to say about his belief? Surely then if Christianity be what it professes to be, a life, like all human and temporal life, it must be conducted upon a principle of faith or trust. If we cannot live our ordinary human life without trust, where we cannot have certainty, neither can we live the spiritual life without trust, where we can neither prove nor demonstrate; then if we think of this life in close relationship with the divine and the infinite life, can it possibly be otherwise than that out of the meeting place of those two mysteries there shall grow mystery and difficulty? All that Christianity requires is, not that man shall not ask for reasonable proof, but that we should not deal with it in a different way from that in which we deal with human life and morality. We don’t ask you in religion to believe without evidence, but to require large evidence. Now my friends, still remember when we ask you to believe before you see all, it is that you may experience all. Christianity has a certainty, but it comes not as the proof, but as the reward of faith. There is a demonstration of the spirit, an evidence of divine life, in the soul of the Christian, that he cannot demonstrate to others, because it is as invisible as his own soul and spirit, and yet it fills the inner core of the spirit—it is the strengthener of the spirit. Christianity is a great experiment, a probable experiment, a reasonable experiment, but still it is an experiment, and you may try it. If you have a simple and earnest desire to ascertain its truth, try it, casting aside the trivial interests that the profligate man has in the disproof of it. Try it and see if there does not come into your soul that conviction not created by science, but springing from the inner life of the soul, that shall be like a well of water springing up to everlasting life. As in life so in religion, “blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.”