The Foundations of Religious Faith

102:0.1To the un­be­liev­ing ma­te­ri­al­ist, man is sim­ply an evo­lu­tion­ary ac­ci­dent. His hopes of sur­vival are strung on a fig­ment of mor­tal imag­i­na­tion; his fears, loves, long­ings, and be­liefs are but the re­ac­tion of the in­ci­den­tal jux­ta­po­si­tion of cer­tain life­less atoms of mat­ter. No dis­play of en­ergy nor ex­pres­sion of trust can carry him be­yond the grave. The de­vo­tional labors and in­spi­ra­tional ge­nius of the best of men are doomed to be ex­tin­guished by death, the long and lonely night of eter­nal obliv­ion and soul ex­tinc­tion. Name­less de­spair is man’s only re­ward for liv­ing and toil­ing un­der the tem­po­ral sun of mor­tal ex­is­tence. Each day of life slowly and surely tight­ens the grasp of a piti­less doom which a hos­tile and re­lent­less uni­verse of mat­ter has de­creed shall be the crown­ing in­sult to ev­ery­thing in hu­man de­sire which is beau­ti­ful, no­ble, lofty, and good.

102:0.2But such is not man’s end and eter­nal des­tiny; such a vi­sion is but the cry of de­spair ut­tered by some wan­der­ing soul who has be­come lost in spir­i­tual dark­ness, and who bravely strug­gles on in the face of the mech­a­nis­tic soph­ist­ries of a ma­te­rial phi­los­o­phy, blinded by the con­fu­sion and dis­tor­tion of a com­plex learn­ing. And all this doom of dark­ness and all this des­tiny of de­spair are for­ever dis­pelled by one brave stretch of faith on the part of the most hum­ble and un­learned of God’s chil­dren on earth.

102:0.3This sav­ing faith has its birth in the hu­man heart when the moral con­scious­ness of man re­al­izes that hu­man val­ues may be trans­lated in mor­tal ex­pe­ri­ence from the ma­te­rial to the spir­i­tual, from the hu­man to the di­vine, from time to eter­nity.