o religious knowledge: and that is
one of the points which I think many religious thinkers have intended
to emphasize by their too hard and fast distinctions between faith and
knowledge.

Belief itself is thus to some extent affected by the state of the will;
and still more emphatically does the extent to which belief affects
action depend upon the will. Many beliefs which we quite sincerely
hold are what have been called 'otiose beliefs'; we do not by an effort
of the will realize them sufficiently strongly for them to affect
action. Many a man knows perfectly that his course of life will injure
or destroy his physical health; it is not through intellectual
scepticism that he disobeys his {132} physician's prescriptions, but
because other desires and inclinations prevent his attending to them
and acting upon them. It is obvious that to men like St. Paul and
Luther faith meant much more than a mere state of the intellect; it
included a certain emotional and a certain volitional attitude; it
included love and it included obedience. Whether our intellectual
beliefs about Religion are energetic enough to influence action, does
to an enormous extent depend upon our wills. Faith is, then, used, and
almost inevitably used, in such a great variety of senses that I do not
like to lay down one definite and exclusive definition of it; but it
would be safe to say that, for many purposes and in many connexions,
religious faith means the deliberate adoption by an effort of the will,
as practically certain for purposes of action and of feeling, of a
religious belief which to the intellect is, or may be, merely probable.
For purposes of life it is entirely reasonable to treat probabilities
as certainties. If a man has reason to think his friend is
trustworthy, he will do well to trust him wholly and implicitly. If a
man has reason to think that a certain view of the Universe is the most
probable one, he will do well habitually to allow that conviction to
dominate not merely his actions, but the habitual tenour of his
emotional and spiritual life. We should not love a human being much if
we allowed ourselves habitually to {133} contemplate the logical
possibility that the loved one was unworthy of, or irresponsive to, our
affection. We could not love God if we habitually contemplated the
fact that His existence rests for us upon judgements in which there is
more or less possibility of error, though there is no reason why we
s