178 
knowledge of divine tilings, or to rest my convictions upon a 
scientific demonstration; but I can venture to say that “ I 
know in Whom I have believed.” Such a belief will be sup- 
ported by collateral evidence, acquiring from age to age a 
cumulative and converging force ; but its essential virtue will 
in all ages be derived from the vital sources of personal love 
and trust. 
15. Such, I would suggest, are in substance the Ethics of 
Belief, as contra-distinguished from the Ethics of Science. 
I heir essential peculiarity is that they are concerned in the 
first instance with our relation to certain persons, rather than 
to certain truths. They thus bring into play those obligations 
of trust and loyalty on which all social life is founded, and 
they render our religious convictions a matter of personal 
allegiance, instead of mere opinion. The first question a 
Christian is asked is not whether he believes certain truths, 
but whether he believes in certain Persons; and he is a 
member of a perpetual society whose fundamental law is alle- 
giance to its Head, ihe vitality of our religion and its influ- 
ence for good have always been in proportion to the distinct- 
ness with which this characteristic element in it has been 
realized. In the early ages of Christianity, as Dr. Newman 
has shown, this personal devotion was predominant over all 
other influences, and constituted the supreme motive power 
of the Gospel. The great achievement of the Reformation 
was to revivify it, and to substitute a personal faith, involving 
trust in a person and self-surrender to Him, for mere habits 
of assent and formal obedience. The effect, wherever the 
Refoimed teaching* took root, was to revive at the same time 
the faculty of faith between man and man, and thus to reinvi- 
gorate society. Possibly a similar revival is equally desirable 
at the present day in order to hold in check the disinteo-ratin en- 
forces now at work amongst us. We cannot, at all events, be 
too careful not to be driven from this ground in upholding 
Of two men with eyes, A. and B., A. declared that he could see what 
went on in the sun, moon, and fixed stars, and that when he said “see ” he 
meant not exactly common seeing, but a superior kind of seeing very hard 
to describe to any one who did not possess it, which he called “ intuimr ” 
B. (who had a good pair of eyes of his own of the common kind) challenged 
A. to read the Twua newspaper at a distance at which B. could not read it. 
A. failed to do so. T hy, said B., “should I believe that you can 
‘intue things in Sirius, when you cannot read small print on the other side 
of the room ? If you want me to behove that you possess faculties of which 
I am destitute, you must prove yourself to be my superior by appealing to 
the faculties which we have in common.” 1 H 
