FAITH AND REASON by T.

Pacific Press Publishing Company · OAKLAND, CALIFORNIA · Sep 26, 1900

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 26, No. 39.

FAITH AND REASON.

By T.

THE highest conception of true reason is through the medium of faith. Faith is always reasonable, and faith always reasons in the only true reasonable way.

THE ground or reason for faith is the Word of God. Faith reasons that if God says so, it is therefore so; for it is impossible for God to lie. Thus, how clear it is that faith bases its reasonings on a foundation that is solid and secure. The Word of God is the only foundation that can not possibly fail, and thus it is made plain that all of the conclusions drawn from the reasonings of faith will be absolutely correct.

FAITH, using as it does the Word of God as its groundwork, does not trust to hearsay to ascertain what that Word is. It must know the Word for itself. It can not depend upon confessions of faith, or man-made theories of religious doctrines, but it must know the words that the Lord Himself has spoken. Hence faith goes to the Book of books, the Bible, and there it dwells, studying these words over and over again. And as the Word thus enters into the mind and heart, faith extends and grows into the broadest manhood, which is true Christianity.

THE surroundings of the individual will have but little effect upon him, provided his mind is centered in the Word of God. For upon this basis he is developing the heroism of true faith. It was while Abraham was in Egypt, surrounded by all of the vices and wickedness of that exceedingly wicked nation, that he was developing that great strength of faith that brought him to the place where he was called "the friend of God." While he was sojourning in the land of Canaan, he was in the midst of an idolatrous people. Vices and superstitions were all around him, but he did not hear the sounds that came from this quarter, for Abraham was listening to the voice of God. God spoke to Abraham, and the record shows that when He spoke Abraham "believed in the Lord; and He counted it to him for righteousness." Gen. 15:6.

THE life of Abraham is not the only record we have of men who have developed the fullest and broadest faith in the very midst of idolatries, superstitions, vices, and crimes. It was amid all the debasing influences of an Egyptian court that Moses kept his fidelity to God, and by listening to the voice of His Word was able, when he came to years of maturity, to choose "rather to suffer affliction with the people of God, than to enjoy the pleasures of sin for a season." Heb. 11:25. It was amidst all the luxuries and abandonments of vice surrounding a Babylonian court that Daniel developed his faith and fidelity to God. And so the record gives us instance after instance of individuals who were able to see beyond the glamor and glitter of this world to the solid realities of that which is before us in the world to come.

BUT these individuals reached these heights of faith not through the ordinary operations of human reason, but by the more reasonable course of believing the Word of God. The individual who stops to reason out things in the way that men generally reason will never reach

any conclusion higher than his own finite impressions; his own circumscribed abilities will hold him within this narrow sphere, but when he adopts the great and true reason, and lays hold of God's Word by faith, he links himself at once with the infinite. His mortal existence of a few brief years here is swallowed up in the immortal eternity of the Father above. With endless years before him, and with constantly expanding abilities, he is ever growing toward the boundless expanse of joys and developments that God has for those who are sufficiently reasonable to lay hold of his Word as the only secure thing of the universe.

TO THE superficial thinker it seems folly to thus take God at His word, and to reason that because God has said so, therefore it is true. But he who will break away from the delusions of a superstitious and superficial world, can readily see that no mathematical theory could be more clearly demonstrated than the incontestable fact that God's Word stands secure, and that the individual who is resting upon that Word is standing upon the only ground that can never be shaken.

YOU often hear people say, "Be sure that you are right, then go ahead." The individual who desires to be sure that he is right in the great and vital question of spiritual truth, should know that the only thing that will enable him to have this assurance is the Word of God itself. God's Word is right, and the individual who has God's Word, and who knows that he has God's Word, and not a theory about it merely, knows perfectly well what is right and what is true.

THEN the only reasonable thing to do is to fortify the mind with the Word of God, that we may be resting all the time upon that solid foundation without which neither faith nor reason can stand.