f all further question. In this sense then faith is
fidelity, fealty, allegiance of the moral nature to God, in opposition
to all usurpation, and in resistance to all temptation to the placing
any other claim above or equal with our fidelity to God.

The will of God is the last ground and final aim of all our duties, and
to that the whole man is to be harmonized by subordination, subjugation,
or suppression alike in commission and omission. But the will of God,
which is one with the supreme intelligence, is revealed to man through
the conscience. But the conscience, which consists in an inappellable
bearing-witness to the truth and reality of our reason, may legitimately
be construed with the term reason, so far as the conscience is
prescriptive; while as approving or condemning, it is the consciousness
of the subordination or insubordination, the harmony or discord, of the
personal will of man to and with the representative of the will of God.
This brings me to the last and fullest sense of Faith, that is, as the
obedience of the individual will to the reason, in the lust of the flesh
as opposed to the supersensual; in the lust of the eye as opposed to the
supersensuous; in the pride of the understanding as opposed to the
infinite, in the [Greek: phronaema sarkos] in contrariety to the
spiritual truth; in the lust of the personal will as opposed to the
absolute and universal; and in the love of the creature, as far as it is
opposed to the love which is one with the reason, namely, the love of
God.

Thus then to conclude. Faith subsists in the 'synthesis' of the reason
and the individual will. By virtue of the latter therefore it must be an
energy, and inasmuch as it relates to the whole moral man, it must be
exerted in each and all of his constituents or incidents, faculties and
tendencies;--it must be a total, not a partial; a continuous, not a
desultory or occasional energy. And by virtue of the former, that is,
reason, faith must be a light, a form of knowing, a beholding of truth.
In the incomparable words of the Evangelist, therefore--'faith must be a
light originating in the Logos, or the substantial reason, which is
coeternal and one with the Holy Will, and which light is at the same
time the life of men'. Now as life is here the sum or collective of all
moral and spiritual acts, in suffering, doing, and being, so is faith
the source and the sum, the energy and the principle of the fidelity of
man to God, by th