^ C. Silvester Home, Sermons and Addresses, 146.
1 PETER I. 5-7 167
other words, behind our beliefs, penetrating and informing them, is to be our own true and manly spirit. We may believe what is wrong — for as long as man lives it will be human to err — but, at least, we must be true. The real truth and sincerity of our mind and heart must never be in doubt. God has nowhere promised that He will keep our minds from error. To exercise the mind in discrimination, in discovery, in analysis and synthesis, this is our business — the task committed to us by the Infinite God. But God has promised to keep our hearts true.
^ Every one remembers the well-worn tale of the pious lady of Vermont in the United States, the view from whose window was blocked by a rocky hill, and who determined to test the promise to faith that it should be removed and cast into the sea. And, according to her lights, she prayed and prayed the night through, till the dawn peeped in at the window, and there was the hill unmoved. "Ah!" she said, "just as I expected ! " But there came along that way a prospecting engineer, with his in- struments and chain measures and dumpy leveller, and examined that hill and accurately measured it. It was in the way of a new railroad, and he expressed his firm faith that it could be removed. The Company at his back adopted his faith, and he added to his faith virtue in the shape of two thousand navvies, and in a few months that hill was removed. If he had had no faith, he would not have put on the navvies ; and if he had not put on the navvies his faith would have been unintluential and inactive. He added to his faith virtue ; he added to his orthodoxy activity ; he added to his creed conduct ; he added to his conviction action. His faith was as the grain of mustard seed, which, when the life or substance is awakened within, moves what, in comparison with its size, are literally mountains. And so the engineer removed the mountain that resisted the prayer, unmixed with action, of the Christian lady of Vermont.^
III.
Knowledge.
There is always danger lest zeal should be misdirected ; lest it
should be employed in the accomplishment of a wrong object, or
lest it should adopt wrong means to attain even a good object.
There is danger too of zeal becoming a wild fanaticism. Hence,
B. Wilberfoice, Sandification by the Truth, 134.
i68 THE UNFOLDING OF CHARACTER
virtue must have in it a supply of knovjledge. The Christian possessing zeal, but without knowledge to guide it, is like a ship without a pilot, in danger of splitting on the rocks. St. Paul was constitutionally an earnest and whole-hearted man, in whatever cause he undertook. The zeal which led Saul of Tarsus to persecute from city to city those who called on the name of the Lord Jesus was just as intense as that which led him afterwards, when he had become the great Apostle of the Gentiles, to exclaim, " I am ready to die for the name of the Lord Jesus." In the former case, however, his zeal was without knowledge. He did it, as he himself said, " in ignorance."
Faith without knowledge is a wilful and unmeaning thing, which can never guide men into light and truth. It will pervert their notions of God ; it will transfer them from one religion to another ; it may undermine and often has undermined their sense of right and wrong. It has no experience of life or of history, no power of understanding or foreseeing the nature of the struggle which is going on in the human heart or the movements which affect Churches, and which, as ecclesiastical history shows, always have been, and will be again. It is apt to rest on some misapplied quotation from Scripture, and to claim for its own creed, theories, and fancies, the authority of inspiration. It is ready to assent to anything, or at least to anything that is in accordance with its own religious feeling, and it has no sense of falsehood or truth. It is fatal to the bringing up of children, because it never takes the right means to its ends, and has never learned to discern differences of character. It never perceives where it is in this world. It is narrowed to its own faith and the articles of its creed, and has no power of embracing all men in the arms of love, or in the purposes of God. It is an element of division among mankind, and not of union. It might be compared to a fire, which gives warmth but not life or growth — which, instead of training or cherishing the tender plants, dries them up, and takes away their spring of youth.
^ Manliness, that which colloquially we call pluck, without knowledge is practically useless, except perhaps to a bulldog. The man who knows is always head and shoulders above the man who does not know, though the latter may be the superior of the former in vigour and endurance. What is the justification for the
2 PETER I. 5-7 169
millions we spend annually in secular education ? It is that ignorance is the mother of degradation ; knowledge is the road to moral and social improvement. Plato says : " Better be unborn than untaught, for ignorance is the root of misfortune." ^