ving mind, and is greater rather than less than the certainty of what
is apprehended by the senses or experienced day by day, this
characteristic difference is most easily discerned. The believer is
probably much more confident about "the care of his Heavenly Father," or
"the life eternal," than he is about this life with its varying and
insignificant experiences and content. For he knows about the life beyond
in quite a different way. The truths of the religious outlook cannot be
put on the same level as those of ordinary and everyday life. And when the
mind passes from one to the other it does so with the consciousness that
the difference is in kind. The knowledge of God and eternity, and the real
value, transcending space and time, of our own inner being, cannot even in
form be mixed up with the trivial truths of the normal human understanding
or the conclusions of science. In fact, the truths of religion exhibit, in
quite a special way, the character of all ideal truths, which are not
really true for every day at all, but are altogether bound up with exalted
states of feeling. This is expressed in the old phrase, "Deus non scitur
sed creditur" [God is not known but believed in]. For the Sorbonne was
quite right and protected one of the essential interests of religion, when
it rejected as heresy the contrary position, that it was possible to
"know" God. Thus, in the way in which I "know" that I am sitting at this
writing-table, or that it rained yesterday, or that the sum of the angles
in a triangle are equal to two right angles, I can know nothing of God.
But I can know of Him something in the way in which I know that to tell
the truth is right, that to keep faith is duty, propositions which are
certain and which state something real and valid, but which I could not
have arrived at without conscious consent, and a certain exaltation of
spirit on my own part. This, and especially the second part of it, holds
true in an increased degree of all religious conceptions. They weave
themselves together out of the most inward and subtle experiences, out of
impressions which are coarsened in the very act of expressing them. Their
import and value must be judged entirely by the standards of conscience
and feeling, by their own self-sufficiency and validity. The best part of
them lies in the intensity and vitality of their experience, and in the
spontaneous acceptance and recognition which they receive. They cannot be
apprehended