ebody has finely said that it does not take
much of a man to be a Christian, but it takes all there is of him. An
early African Christian, Arnobius, tells us that we must "cling to God
with all our senses, so to speak." And Thomas Carlyle gave us a picture
of the ideal believer when he wrote of his father that "he was religious
with the consent of his whole faculties." It is faith's ability to
engross a man's entire self, going down to the very roots of his being,
that renders it indestructible. It can say of those who seek to
undermine it, as Hamlet said of his enemies:

It shall go hard,
But I will delve one yard below their mines.

As an experience, God is a discovery which each must make for himself.
Religion comes to us as an inheritance; and at the outset we can no more
distinguish the voice of God from the voices of men we respect, than the
boy Samuel could distinguish the voice of Jehovah from that of Eli. But
we gradually learn to "possess our possession," to respond to our own
highest inspirations, whether or not they inspire others. Pascal well
says: "It is the consent of yourself to yourself and the unchanging
voice of your own reason that ought to make you believe." So far only
as we repeat for ourselves the discoveries of earlier explorers of Him
who is invisible have we any religion of our own. And this personal
experience is the ground of our certainty; "as we have heard, so have we
seen in the city of our God."

Religious experience, and even Christian experience, appears in a great
variety of forms; and there is always a danger lest those who are
personally familiar with one type should fail to acknowledge others as
genuine. The mystics are apt to disparage the rationalists; hard-headed,
conscientious saints look askance at seers of visions; and those whose
new life has broken forth with the energy and volume of a geyser hardly
recognize the same life when it develops like a spring-born stream from
a small trickle, increased by many tributaries, into a stately river.
The value of an experience is to be judged not by its form, but by its
results. Fortunately for Christianity the New Testament contains a
variety of types. With the first disciples the light dawns gradually; on
St. Paul it bursts in a flash brighter than noonday. The emotional
heights and depths of the seer on Patmos contrast with the steady level
disclosed in the practical temperament of the writer of the _Epistle of
James_. But