You doubt if there be any God?
Doubt is the torpid man's complaint ;
Still hibernating 'neath your clod,
Your sins and virtues grow too faint.
But come where life is all ablow :
Be a murderer or a saint.
And you will know.^
Who of us, in the face of the broad features of everywhere- abounding suffering, dares to repeat the Apostle's words, or is able to say that he partakes of the bold confidence of his assertion ? And yet, how desirable to be able to do so ! For that man is certainly to be envied who can contemplate impending famine, pestilence, and war with unmoved confidence as to the issue ; who can call to mind all our military establishments armed for conflict, our gaols with their usual quota of men of violence and crime, our madhouses and their deplorable inmates, our hospitals and their patients, our poorhouses and their mass of pauperism, the accidents and fatalities that attend our life, the destitution that everywhere abounds ; the different forms of vice and crime that roam at large unassailable by our laws, and, in the presence of all, maintain unmoved that all things work together for good to those who love God.
^ Fifty years or so before Christ, a cultivated Eoman represents himself as discoursing pleasantly with his friends on the momentous question of the supreme good. With great skill and clearness he states and explains the views of the rival philosophers who had made this the subject of elaborate discussion. But, after a calm and dispassionate survey of the whole field, he puts down his pen without a word to indicate in which du-ection
^ John A. Button, Guidance from Browning, 101. ^ Anna Bunston.
ROMANS VIII. 28 loi
his own preference lay. In this, perhaps, he represented the majority of the thoughtful men of his time. To them, life was a problem without any sure key to its solution, an arena on which incongruous and conflicting forces, whose laws and tendencies were alike inscrutable, played themselves out. It baffled specula- tion. It refused to be amenable to any theory.
About fifty years after Christ, or a century later, there were living in Kome and its adjacent districts a community of men who had arrived at the most novel and astonishing conclusions on this very point. Though they were few in number, of insignificant position, and counting scarcely any of the learned in their ranks, they were persuaded that all the complex and varied experiences of life were specially disposed to enable them to reach the highest blessedness, and they were not in the least doubt as to what that blessedness was. " We know," says the Apostle, speaking for his readers as well as for himself, " that to them that love God all things work together for good, even to them that are called according to his purpose."^
1. How did St. Paul arrive at this state of certainty ? — When St. Paul says " We know," he is speaking under a persuasion or conclusion to which he was compelled by his religious feeling rising to the degree and temperature of certainty. If God is such an one as we are obliged to believe Him to be, He will surely take care of His own. This is the argument. He frequently uses this formula, " We know." Thus he says, " We know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain . . . waiting for the adoption, to wit, the redemption of our body." Again, " We know that if our earthly house of this tabernacle were dissolved, we have a building of God, an house not made with hands." Again, " I know whom I have believed, and am persuaded that he is able to keep that which I have committed unto him." He calls these high matters subjects of knowledge, but in the last analysis they belong to faith, an inward persuasion carried clear up to the threshold of certainty. This spiritual instinct, inward witness, 'y' secret inspiration which enabled St. Paul to declare " We know " in relation to invisible, eternal things, is a highly important possession and a rare endowment. There is too much conjecture and doubt in the matter of religious truths, and too little conviction and certitude. We do not get joy out of religion
^ 0. Moinet,
102 LOVE'S PROSPERITY
because we are not sure enough about it. Most Christians lack that private assurance which with St. Paul was equivalent to knowledge. This is a great defect in current religious experience ; we grope in a fog, we set foot on a void, we do not feel solidity and resistance beneath our tread.
2. How can we arrive at such a state of certainty ?
(1) In the first place, we must find an answer to another question — How do we know anything with certainty ? Now, we can know a fact intuitively, such as that two straight lines having no inclination towards each other cannot intersect. Or we can know it upon premises of argument and deduction, as when a boy at school assents to a demonstration in Euclid. Or we may be said to know a fact by reason of confidence in the authority or veracity of others, belief in such a case becoming knowledge for all practical purposes,