The miracles of Jesus - Classical Christian Literature by Athleo.net

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TO FAITH 99
because the Nile is unusually low, and the cause of
this is that the great Lake Nyanza is two feet below
its usual level. No springs in the channel itself can
make up for that loss ;
but, unlike that lake, the inexhaustible
fulness of the divine nature and resources
may be absolutely reckoned on by any one of us in
time of need, and all we have to fear is lest the
channel should become choked by our worldliness or
by our doubt. It is as a means of contact between
the human and the divine, between man and his
Maker, that faith is made so much of in Scripture.
In itself faith in God is nothing which can be
appreciated by our fellow-men, as our philanthropy
may be, and hence many are disposed to make
little of it. "Do the right thing," they say, "live a
good life, and leave out of consideration and out of
cultivation this transcendental talk about faith."
Such teaching as this, " Without faith it is impossible
to please God," is, to these men, incredible
and even incomprehensible. But faith is not, as they
assume it to be, a virtue which has an artificial value
given to it by theologians. It is the soul's one receptive
faculty. It is the hand which takes what the
divine hand gives, and apart from which we cannot
lay hold of what is spiritual. True, it is invisible and
immeasurable. Much else is. The new system of
wireless telegraphy seems to many an incredible
one, for how, say they, can a message pass from one
place to another without some wire to connect the
two But though the medium is intangible and invisible,
there is a medium, and but for the ether
through which vibrations pass, no message could be
transmitted. Faith is like the ether. It cannot be