hould, in our speculative moments, claim a greater certainty for them
than seems to be reasonable. The doctrine that 'probability is the
guide of life' is one on which every sensible man habitually acts in
all other relations of life: Bishop Butler was right in contending that
it should be applied no less unhesitatingly to the matter of religious
belief and religious aspiration.

The view which I have taken of the nature of faith may be illustrated
by the position of Clement of Alexandria. It is clear from his
writings that by faith he meant a kind of conviction falling short of
demonstration or immediate intellectual insight, and dependent in part
upon the state of the will and the heart. Clement did not disparage
knowledge in the interests of faith: faith was to him a more elementary
kind of knowledge resting largely upon moral conviction, and the
foundation of that higher state of intellectual apprehension which he
called Gnosis. I do not mean, of course, to adopt Clement's Philosophy
as a whole; I merely refer to it as illustrating the point that,
properly considered, faith is, or rather includes, a particular kind or
stage {134} of knowledge, and is not a totally different and even
opposite state of mind. It would be easy to show that this has been
fully recognized by many, if not most, of the great Christian thinkers.

One last point. It is of the utmost importance to distinguish between
the process by which psychologically a man arrives at a religious or
other truth and the reasons which make it true. Because I deny that
the truth of God's existence can reasonably be accepted on the basis of
an immediate judgement or intuition, I do not deny for one moment that
an apparently intuitive conviction of the truth of Christianity, as of
other religions, actually exists. The religious belief of the vast
majority of persons has always rested, and must always rest, very
largely upon tradition, education, environment, authority of one kind
or another--authority supported or confirmed by a varying measure of
independent reflection or experience. And, just where the influence of
authority is most complete and overwhelming, it is least felt to be
authority. The person whose beliefs are most entirely produced by
education or environment is very often most convinced that his opinions
are due solely to his own immediate insight. But even where this is
not the case--even where the religious man is taking a new departur