^f The believing heart is indispensable to the discovery of truth. I do not say that it is indispensable to the discovery of all truth, although there is a sense in which it is true that no truth can be discovered without it. I do say that the truth he needs cannot be discovered by any man unless one of the organs by which he sets about perceiving it is the heart of trust and faith. No man by mathematical reasoning can get at the whole truth. We know that no man arrives at all that range of truth which is personal by his mathematical reasoning ; that he gets at that, if he ever gets at it at all, by quite other faculties. That is what Tennyson declares in his protest in " In Memoriam " :
If e'er when faith had fall'n asleep, I heard a voice " believe no more " And heard an ever-breaking shore
That tumbled in the Godless deep ;
A warmth within the breast would melt The freezing reason's colder part, And like a man in wrath the heart
Stood up and answer'd, "I have felt."
He does not mean to shut out any one set of faculties ; he simply means to assert on behalf of another set its rights in our search after and discovery of truth.^
^ The heart has reasons which the reason does not know. It ifl the heart that feels God, not the reason. There are truths that are felt, and there are truths that are proved, for we know truth not only by reason but by the intuitive conviction which may be called the heart. The primary truths are not demonstrable, and
* R. E. Speer, The Master of the Heart, 35.
192 THE HEART AND THE MOUTH
yet our knowledge of them is none the less certain. Principles are felt; propositions are proved. Truths may be above reason and yet not be contrary to reason.^
2. It is essential to this heart-faith that we have genuine love to God. In the absence of goodwill towards God, there can never be this faith of the heart. You remember how Cecil taught his little daughter the meaning of gospel faith. She came to him, one day, with her hands full of little beads, greatly delighted, to show them. He said to her calmly, " You had better throw them all into the fire." She was almost confounded ; but when she saw that he was in earnest, she trustfully obeyed, and cast them in. After a few days, he brought home for her a casket of jewels. " There, my daughter," said he ; " you had faith in me the other day, and threw your beads into the fire ; that was faith ; now I can give you things much more precious. Are not these far better ? " So you should always believe in God. He has jewels for those who will believe and cast away their sins.^
^ A Christian lawyer from Cripple Creek told me once, as we talked over the question of how a man might get his life righted, of an experience of his own years ago, when, in a great deal of perplexity, he had gone to his old pastor to ask him for help as to how he might get his life directed aright. He said the old man simply turned to the 32nd Psalm and read him these two verses : " I will instruct thee and teach thee in the way which thou shalt go ; I will counsel thee with mine eye upon thee. Be ye not as the horse, or as the mule, which have no understanding : whose trappings must be bit and bridle to hold them in, else they will not come near unto thee." Then, my friend said, the old man shut up his Bible and turned away. At first he felt no little resent- ment at his pastor for this curt way of replying to his inquiry; but when he went away and thought it over he saw that the whole secret of a right life lay just here, that the only way in which God could ever guide a man was not by some mechanical instruction, not by fitting a bit into a man's mouth and pulling him this way and that with a rein, but by planting in his heart His own Spirit and letting that Spirit guide him.^
ii. The Centre of Belief is in Christ and His Resurrection. 1. The argument of the preceding verses is that to confess Jesus as Lord implies a true faith in the incarnate, risen, ascended 1 Pasc*l. * 0. G. Fiimey. ^ R. E. Speer.
ROMANS X. lo 193
Christ. It is the proof of the faith that it manifests itself in confession. Now it is impossible to suppose for a moment that St. Paul is speaking of a merely intellectual assent to the doctrines of the Incarnation and Eesurrection of our Lord. It might appear that he inserted the words " with the heart " to prevent Buch a misconception. But, on the other hand, we must beware of completely sundering " heart " and " head " beliefs, according to modern phraseology. St. Paul, on the contrary, unites them, for the "heart" must be understood to include the intellect, since it embraces the whole spiritual and moral being. It is the entirety of our nature that must be absorbed in a living, active, personal faith in Christ as our risen Lord and Saviour.