Faith | AdventAI

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Jun 7, 1883

Faith.

The following extracts from a recently published sermon by Dr. Parkhurst, of New York, show clearly that faith is one of the essential elements in carrying on the ordinary affairs of life, as well as in the Christian life, and that skeptics, who sneer at the Christian's faith, are themselves possessed of a kind of faith that might almost be called simple credulity:—

To any thinking man here, then, whose sharp thinking does not bring him nearer God and the Bible, but away from it, I want to illustrate that while faith is an important factor in religion, it is just the same important factor in everything else. We live in all respects by our conviction of the things we cannot see. Every step we take anywhere we take in faith. We step down upon unknown ground with no knowledge of what lies an inch under the surface. Not a footfall but takes much for granted. That is a near and just picture of what holds everywhere. We see one per cent. and assume ninety-nine. We go but a little ways before we bring up against the unknown. We treat the unknown as though it were known. That is faith, treating the unknown as though it were known. We are continually cracking the shell to get at the hidden meat. When you step aboard a train, how much do you know of the man whose hand is on the valve? A thousand lives go speeding along the track, forty miles an hour, and that one man holds those lives in his hand. Do we as Christians live by faith in the Son of God? Yes; and so on the railway train, you live by faith in the engineer; and so on the steamer, you live by faith in the man on the bridge. It is one thing. We walk by faith. We ride by faith. And all along the line are men whom you do not know, flagmen, road-repairers, yet in whose hand you put your life. You ride by faith. On the fidelity of the man at the switch depend a hundred lives and a million interests. "But somebody knows him." O, yes! But you don't. That is the point. You travel by faith. You walk by your conviction of the things you cannot see. We take men at their word. Are men false? Not nearly so much as they are true. Otherwise society would be impossible. No faith, no society; no faith, no trade. Faith is among men what gravity is among planets and suns. Count Cavour said that the man who trusted men would make fewer mistakes than the man who distrusted them.

We should never get a single day's work done if we stopped to prove every step. The element of faith and of daring enters into every successful life. Business can go on on the street because men believe in each other. That is why you will not deal with a man on 'change, whose word is not as good as his bond. If the business men of this city should commence to-morrow morning to walk only by sight, there is not a business interest in the country that would not be flat before night-fall. Shaken confidence in men has always been the prolific mother of mercantile disaster. And so when Paul says, "We walk by faith," we will remember that faith plays in religion only the same part as that with which we are made daily familiar in the concerns of society, the home, and the street.

If it happens that your mind rebels against faith as something that is at variance with wholesome intellectual action, and under the ban of all that is scientific and mentally discreet, I wish you would, with that in mind, read largely of our standard works of science, late or early. Take such a work, as Darwin's "Origin of Species." To me one of the most impressive features of the book is the ease and good humor with which in it science and faith get along together. I do not mean his faith in God—perhaps he had none—I mean his faith, his constant walk by the assurance of things hoped for, by the conviction of things unseen. That is faith, and Darwin had that in proportions that were simply colossal. He had a magnificent faith in his theory, the theory of evolution. He could not prove the theory, and he knew he couldn't, and what is more he continually confessed that he couldn't. Over and over again, with all the simplicity of a child, he admits that his convictions run away ahead of his proofs. And it is so in all of these books so far as I am familiar with them. Their conclusions are a great deal larger than their premises. That is not spoken in a critical spirit. I am not finding fault with the evolution, nor with Mr. Darwin's book. I am only saying that he was a man of immense faith; he could not have written as he did if he hadn't been; he reached results without stopping to be logical; that is faith. He had faith, just the same kind of faith that Isaiah had, only exercised towards his doctrine instead of exercised toward God. If he had been as disposed to walk by the conviction of an invisible God as he was to walk by the conviction of an undemonstrated hypothesis, he might have turned out as sublime a prophet as Isaiah, or as superb an apostle as St. Paul. I have no controversy with the evolution. Men object to religion because it is such a tax on faith; and I only want you should look directly at the fact, that in the priests of science, faith—just such faith as Peter and John had—is a distinguishing feature; in fact, it is to faith as much as to anything that their supremacy in the priesthood of science is due.

And now, to this same hesitant class of hearers, there is one other thing I want to say in behalf of faith. It is not intellectual debility that we have seen. On the contrary (and this is the point I want to make), on the contrary, the very heroism and enterprise of the intellect. Faith is not a passivity, but a faculty. Faith is power, the material of effect. Faith is a kind of winged intellect. The great workmen of history have been men who believed like giants. Take the eleventh of Hebrews, that famous roll-call of God's men of faith, and the men that made events for two thousand years are all in it,—Noah, Abraham, Moses, Gideon, David. And ever since then the men that have helped the world forward and wrought great effects in the world, have been those who have lived by the power and fascination exerted upon them by the things outside their horizon, by the power of unseen things flung up upon their sky in mirage. Standing upon the shores of Spain, Columbus reasoned upon the drift-wood borne in on the western tide, but there was a million times more in his conclusion than there was in the drift-wood. His winged thought had reached the great West before the Santa Maria weighed anchor in Palos. Faith discovered America, and made Columbus more royal than the crowned heads of Europe. Faith is the heroism of intellect. Nothing would ever have been done in the world if before the deed the doer had waited to calculate all the elements in the case, and compute all the contingencies. Every great and grand discovery begins as an inspired guess. The best things have not been reasoned out, but conjectured. As one has said, "Newton's passage from a falling apple to a falling moon was a leap of the imagination." Such an imagination as that of Columbus or Newton is but another name for faith ablaze. My friend, if you have not faith-power enough to outrun your thought, you will not have deed-power enough to overtake your thought. Faith is not debility nor phlegm. Faith is mind at its best, its bravest, and its fieriest. Faith is thought become poetry, and absorbing into itself the soul's great passions. Faith is intellect carried up to its transfigurement. Don't dare think one disrespectful thought of faith. The power of grand living and superb doing is all in it. Think on these things; brood over them, and may the power of the Great Unseen put its spell upon you, the invisible continent cast itself up upon your sky in mirage, holding your ship's prow onward, forever onward to the great West, till you stand down on the new shore, hope ripened into fruition, faith flashed into vision.