encies
so far considered--I refer to the way of Faith. By Faith I mean the
soul's moral or appreciative apprehension of God as _historically
revealed_, particularly as revealed in the personal life of Jesus
Christ. This Faith-way to God cannot be wholly separated--except by an
artificial abstraction--from the inward way of mysticism, or from the
implications of Reason. It is no blind acceptance of traditional
opinions, no uncritical reliance on "authority," or on some mysterious
infallible oracle. It is the spiritual response--or "assent," as
Clement of Alexandria called it--the moral swing of our inmost self, as
we catch insights of a loving Heart and holy Will revealed through the
words and lives and sufferings of saints and prophets, who have lived
by their vision of God, and supremely revealed in the Life and Love,
the Passion and the Triumphs of that Person whose experience and
character and incarnation of life's possibilities seem at last adequate
for all the needs--the heights and the depths--of this complex life of
ours.

It was Luther's living word which first brought the momentous
significance of Faith to clear consciousness in the sixteenth century.
But the new way of Faith meant many and discordant things, according to
the preparation of the ears of those who heard. It spoke, as all
Pentecosts do, to each man in his own tongue. To those who came to the
Lutheran insight with a deep hunger of spirit for reality and with
minds liberated by Humanistic studies, the Faith-message meant new
heavens and a new earth. It was a new discovery of God, and a new
estimate of man. They suddenly caught {xl} a vision of life as it was
capable of becoming, and they committed their fortunes to the task of
making that possible world real. By a shift of view, as revolutionary
as that from Ptolemaic astronomy to the verifiable insight of
Copernicus, they passed over from the dogma of a Christ who came to
appease an angry God, and to found a Church as an ark of safety in a
doomed world, to the living apprehension of a Christ--verifiable in
experience--who revealed to them, in terms of His own nature, an
eternally tender, loving, suffering, self-giving God, and who made them
see, with the enlightened eyes of their heart, the divine possibilities
of human life. Through this insight, they were the beginners of a new
type of Christianity, which has become wide-spread and impressive in
the modern world, a type that finds the