between knowledge and religious
{128} faith finds whatever real justification it possesses in these
characteristics of religious knowledge. I might insist on the
frequently implicit and unanalysed character of religious thinking;
upon the incompleteness and inadequacy of even the fullest account that
the maturest and acutest Philosopher can give of ultimate Reality; upon
the merely probable and analogical character of much of the reasoning
which is necessarily employed both in the most popular and in the most
philosophical kinds of reasoning about such matters; and above all upon
the prominent place which moral judgements occupy in religious thought,
moral judgements which, on account of their immediate character and
their emotional setting, are often not recognized in their true
character as judgements of the Reason. Most of the mistakes into which
popular thinking has fallen in this matter--the mistakes which
culminate in the famous examination-paper definition of faith as 'a
means of believing that which we know not to be true'--would be avoided
if we would only remember, with St. Paul and most of the greater
religious thinkers, that the true antithesis is not between faith and
reason but between faith and sight. All religious belief implies a
belief in something which cannot be touched or tasted or handled, and
which cannot be established by any mere logical deduction from what can
be touched or tasted or handled. So far from implying {129} scepticism
as to the power of Reason, this opposition between faith and sight
actually asserts the possibility of attaining by thought to a knowledge
of realities which cannot be touched or tasted or handled--a knowledge
of equal validity and trustworthiness with that which is popularly said
to be due to the senses, though Plato has taught us once for all[1]
that the senses by themselves never give us real knowledge, and that in
the apprehension of the most ordinary matter of fact there is implied
the action of the self-same intellect by which alone we can reach the
knowledge of God.

It may further be pointed out that, though neither religious knowledge
nor moral knowledge are mere emotion, they are both of them very
closely connected with certain emotions. Great moral discoveries are
made, not so much by superior intellectual power, as by superior
interest in the subject-matter of Morality. Very ordinary intelligence
can see, when it is really brought to bear upon the mat