elief, doctrine, and opinions
which we are apt to accept. How strange it very often seems that men go
to the Church, or to one another, and say: "Must I believe this doctrine
in order that I can enter into the Church?" "Must I believe this
doctrine in order that I may be saved?" men say, with a strange sort of
notion about what salvation is. How strange it seems, when we really
have got our intelligence about us and know what it is to believe! To
believe a new truth, if it be really truth and we really believe it, is
to have entered into a new region, in which our life shall find a new
expansion and a new youth. Therefore, not "Must we believe?" but "May I
believe?" is the true cry of the human creature who is seeking for the
richest fulfilment of his life, who is working that his whole nature may
find its complete expansion and so its completest exercise. We talk a
great deal in these days and in this place about a liberal faith. What
is a liberal faith, my friends? It seems to me that by every true
meaning of the word, by every true thought of the idea, a liberal faith
is a faith that believes much, and not a faith that believes little. The
more a man believes, the more liberally he exercise his capacity of
faith, the more he sends forth his intelligence into the mysteries of
God, the more he understands those things which God chooses to reveal to
his creatures, the more liberally he believes. Let yourselves never
think that you grow liberal in faith by believing less; always be sure
that the true liberality of faith can only come by believing more. It is
true, indeed, that as soon as a man becomes eager for belief, for the
truth of God and for the mysteries with which God's universe is filled,
he becomes all the more critical and careful. He will hot any longer, if
he were before, be simply greedy of things to believe, so that if any
superstition comes offering itself to him he will not gather it in
indiscriminately and believe it without evidence, without examination.
He becomes all the more critical and careful, the more he becomes
assured that belief, and not unbelief, is the true condition of his
life. The truth that God has entered into this world in wondrous ways
and filled its life with Jesus Christ, the truth that man has a soul and
not simply a body, that he has a spiritual need, that God cares for him
and he is to care for himself, that there is an immortal life, and that
that which we call faith is but the o