The Collapse of the Faith [pp. 339-360]

THE PRINCE T0N RE VIEW.
and literary critics? Can faith in these days make headway
against reason, and especially against the instructed reason of
positive science and the illuminated time-spirit? These ques tions are often asked, and they admit and require a distinct and
positive answer.
The lines of evidence and argument which are decisive of the
great truths with which faith need concern itself are equally
open to all men who are capable of cool reflection. Science
often hinders rather than helps to the exercise of such reflection
by limiting the attention to special activities and special relations,
by the glare and bewilderment of brilliant discoveries, by the
narrow conceit of independence or novelty of opinion, and by the
excitement attendant upon the reception of a paradQxical theory.
The activity of its defenders and the novelty of its subjectmatter may so preoccupy the mind as to shut out those familiar
relations which would decide the argument with a simpler and
more limited understanding. Faith, so far as it is an intellectual
process, being when philosophically conceived either an intuitive
or inductive act upon moral or spiritual data, requires concentrated attention to a few comprehensive but easily apprehensible facts and relations. These facts and relations are given, or
rather they are offered, to every man's experience and to every
man's reflection. They concern God, duty, immortality, personality, moral perfection, sin, guilt, redemption, on the one
hand, and the acts and manifestations of God in providence and
human history which are suited to man's condition. The man in
common life is tempted only to ridicule the atheism of Physicus,
and having no special reverence for authority, he pronounces.
positively, "The fool hath said in his heart, No God." He
smiles at the laborious piety of Mr. Spencer in charging impiety
upon the man who thinks of God as a Father, and professes to
know that he may worship Him; for to him personality is avery
positive and dignified fact, and he cannot even understand what
Mr. Spencer means. The'new ethics he practically rejects and
abhors, because he has rights to defend and sacred duties to perform, and a private and family and social life to live, with its manifold obligations and its needed laws and restraints. His difficulties about the supernatural were all settled when he had occasion
to use prayer or to trust in the guidance of Providence. A rev
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