^ There is no slight amount of peril in matters of religion in demanding more evidence than can actually be given. Men formerly used to say, " Write the Gospel — the Divine message — in letters of fire along the sky, and I will believe." They say now, " Give me mathematical demonstration — make the whole thing as plain as a problem in geometry — and then it will be impossible for me to withhold my assent." But this has to be considered, that we have hardly the right to require the Creator to give us the amount of evidence that we think fit to ask for. What He will do in this way, is surely for Him and not for us to settle. And if He should give, as He does, sufficient evidence to make unbelief inexcusable — sufficient evidence to enable us to believe, if we are not determined to disbelieve — I do not see what we have to complain of.^
^ To a man who wrote to him saying that he was dying of an incurable disease, and could not accept the Christian faith, Bishop Creighton replied : " There can be no convincing proof of anything that affects our inner character. What 'convincing proof ' have you that your wife loves you or your child ? Yet you believe it, and that belief is more real to you than anything
' Bishop A. F. W. Ingram, Secrets of Strength, 57. « G. Calthrop, In Christ, 213.
ST. JOHN XX. 29 379
that you know or can prove. Religion must be a matter of belief, not of proof. It depends on a consciousness of the relation between our soul and God. Immortality depends on the knowledge of the meaning of our soul's life which we obtain from looking at it in the light of God. The more we find our soul, the more readily do we see God in the person of Jesus Christ. Look back upon your own life, your growth, the traces of Provi- dence, the presence of God's love. Do you think that all this wonderful process can come to an abrupt end ? " ^
(4) The evidence of sense is not always applicable. Eeligion is not a proposition to be proved like a problem in Euclid. As to mathematical demonstration, the subject, in the nature of things, is not capable of it. Were it a matter for the head alone it would be different ; but the heart is concerned in the matter. You have the two factors — the head and the heart — to deal with ; and in the case of religion, there is no possibility of so binding the heart down, by any conceivable process whatever, that it should not be capable of resistance if it should choose to resist.
^ The following is from the pen of a well-known London physician and scientist of the present day, one wlio for many years was a Catholic : — " What men of science ' want ' in order to believe in the Incarnation and Resurrection of Jesus Christ is this. In one word, it is 'proof, or evidence — what we can prove by experi- ment, inductive reasoning, and verification that we know. As Bithell says, 'The man of science has learned to believe in justification, not by faith, but by verification, therefore he nurses no illusions, does not say he knows when he does not and cannot know and follow the evidence whithersoever it leads him.' If I had been St. Thomas I should have wanted (1) the death-certificate of a medical man who had watched the case to the end ; (2) proof that the doors were not only ' shut,' but locked and bolted on the inside ; and (3) I should have carefully examined the wound in the side to ascertain whether heart, lungs, liver, or any other vital organ had been perforated, and whether what I saw was an apparition, or a spirit, or a body with ' flesh and bones,' and if the latter, I should have said, * This was never a dead body.' It is seriously doubted by some writers whether either LazarUs or Christ was really dead, and some believe that, in the case of Christ, restoratives were administered by the women in the sepulchre. There is no evidence that would satisfy a lawyer or scientist either (1) that Jesus Christ raised Lazarus from the dead, or (2) that
^ Life arid Letters of Manddl CrcigTiton, ii, 253.
38o BELIEVING WITHOUT SEEING
Jesus Christ Himself rose from the dead, and that afterwards His crucified body, with its wounds, entered a room the doors of which were shut."^
2. After all that the senses can do there remains the unseen, and faith must make its venture. All the greatest works of man have been works of faith ; and those who have had most insight, and have followed the guidance of that insight till it led them to great truths, are the men who have taken the leading part in the history of our race. It is faith that incites the soldier and sailor to noble acts, faith in their commander. Perhaps the grandest discovery made by man was the opening of a vast continent ; and it was faith that led Columbus across the untried and unknown seas. This is the natural view of faith, and St. Paul, tracing the history of the saints of old, marks how the animating principle of life to them was faith. And what led God to choose the Israelites as the nation through which He would reveal Himself to the world was the readiness of their faith, their adherence to the promises and their continued trust, through all the ages of count- less trials — the long years of their waiting, ever filled with the " great cloud of witnesses," who without seeing yet believed, into whose possessions we have entered, as the children of a higher faith, and disciples who have learnt at the feet of a greater Master — of the ever-growing host of which it may be truly said in the words of the text, " Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed."