lace themselves in immediate relationship with the Soul of the World,
with God, in order that they may find the guarantee or substance of what
they hope for, which is not to die, and the evidence of what they do not
see.

And since a person is a will, and will always has reference to the
future, he who believes, believes in what is to come--that is, in what
he hopes for. We do not believe, strictly speaking, in what is or in
what was, except as the guarantee, as the substance, of what will be.
For the Christian, to believe in the resurrection of Christ--that is to
say, in tradition and in the Gospel, which assure him that Christ has
risen, both of them personal forces--is to believe that he himself will
one day rise again by the grace of Christ. And even scientific
faith--for such there is--refers to the future and is an act of trust.
The man of science believes that at a certain future date an eclipse of
the sun will take place; he believes that the laws which have governed
the world hitherto will continue to govern it.

To believe, I repeat, is to place confidence in someone, and it has
reference to a person. I say that I know that there is an animal called
the horse, and that it has such and such characteristics, because I have
seen it; and I say that I believe in the existence of the giraffe or the
ornithorhyncus, and that it possesses such and such qualities, because I
believe those who assure me that they have seen it. And hence the
element of uncertainty attached to faith, for it is possible that a
person may be deceived or that he may deceive us.

But, on the other hand, this personal element in belief gives it an
effective and loving character, and above all, in religious faith, a
reference to what is hoped for. Perhaps there is nobody who would
sacrifice his life for the sake of maintaining that the three angles of
a triangle are together equal to two right angles, for such a truth does
not demand the sacrifice of our life; but, on the other hand, there are
many who have lost their lives for the sake of maintaining their
religious faith. Indeed it is truer to say that martyrs make faith than
that faith makes martyrs. For faith is not the mere adherence of the
intellect to an abstract principle; it is not the recognition of a
theoretical truth, a process in which the will merely sets in motion our
faculty of comprehension; faith is an act of the will--it is a movement
of the soul towards a practical truth, to