alike of ordinary life and of the Scriptures is that the Just 
shall live by Faith. 
9. Whereas, therefore, the first principle laid down in the 
article under discussion as belonging to the Ethics of Belief is 
“ the duty of inquiry,” it would be more true to nature to 
substitute “the duty of faith.” Distinguishing Belief both 
from Opinion and from Knowledge, and restricting it, sub- 
stantially, to the field of testimony, it may be laid down as 
the first principle of the subject that all testimony has a 
primd facie claim to be believed, and that the onus probandi 
always lies upon those who question it. Such, perhaps, is in 
great measure the force of that appeal to authority in matters 
of opinion which has lately been discussed by two eminent 
writers. It seems too narrow an interpretation to say, as Sir 
James Stephen does, that “ authority is only another name 
for the evidence of experts.” In practice it is much more 
than this ; the consentient belief of a large mass of mankind, 
even though the experts among them be comparatively few, 
having a distinct influence of its own. How far this influence 
may amount, as Mr. Gladstone has been understood to imply, 
to substantial evidence in favour of an impugned doctrine, 
would seem mainly to depend upon the character of the 
particular doctrine in question. The testimony of Christians 
to the fact that in their personal experience they have found 
the promises of the Gospel fulfilled must carry, for instance, 
and does carry, the greatest possible weight ; but it can only 
afford indirect support to the truths beyond their experience 
which are alleged in the Creeds. It cannot, however, reason- 
ably be denied that such general testimony constitutes a primd 
facie claim in favour of a doctrine, and casts the burden of 
proof on those who question it. Our instinct — an instinct 
no less just than natural — is to believe what comes to us 
with such testimony, and from this instinct we must 
start. 
10. But of course Faith, like all other instincts of nature, 
requires to be checked by the exercise of reason. It is like an 
appetite, a hunger or a thirst, which will insist on asserting 
itself, but which must nevertheless be controlled. To say, in- 
deed, that a man who has no time to make himself a competent 
judge of disputable questions “should have no time to believe,” 
is like saying that a man who has no time to study medicine 
should have no time to eat. A man must believe, whether 
he will or no. He must act every day of his life on the basis 
of certain moral and political — nay, religious assumptions, of 
which few men can be competent judges, and all that can be 
