ediate
effect to weaken little by little the faith until it finally kills it
altogether. Sloth is a microbe. It creeps into the soul, sucks in its
substance and causes a spiritual consumption. This is neither an acute
nor a violent malady, but it consumes the patient, dries him up, wears
him out, till life goes out like a lamp without oil.

CHAPTER XVII.
WHAT WE BELIEVE.

OUR first duty to God, and the first obligation imposed upon us by the
First Commandment is Faith, or belief in God--we must know Him.

Belief is solely a manner of knowing. It is one way of apprehending, or
getting possession of, a truth. There are other ways of acquiring
knowledge; by the senses, for instance, seeing, hearing, etc., and by
our intelligence or reason. When truth comes to us through the senses,
it is called experience; if the reason presents it, it is called
science; if we use the faculty of the soul known as faith, it is
belief.

You will observe that belief, experience and science have one and the
same object, namely, truth. These differ only in the manner of
apprehending truth. Belief relies on the testimony of others;
experience, on the testimony of the senses; science, on that of the
reason. What I believe, I get from others; what I experience or
understand, I owe to my individual self. I neither believe nor
understand that Hartford exists--I see it. I neither understand nor see
that Rome exists--I believe it. I neither see nor believe that two
parallel lines will never meet--I reason it out, I understand it.

Now it is beside the question here to object that belief, or what we
believe, may or may not be true. Neither is all that we see, nor all
that our reason produces, true. Human experience and human reason, like
all things human, may err. Here we simply remark that truth is the
object of our belief, as it is the object of our experience and of
understanding. We shall later see that if human belief may err, faith
or divine belief cannot mislead us, cannot be false.

Neither is it in order here to contend that belief, of its very nature,
is something uncertain, that it is synonymous of opinion; or if it
supposes a judgment, that judgment is "formidolose," liable at any
moment to be changed or contradicted. The testimony of the senses and
of reason does not always carry certain conviction. We may or may not
be satisfied with the evidence of human belief. As for the divine, or
faith, it is certain, or it is not at all;