FAITH, HOPE, AND LOVE
W. John Murray
The Astor
Lectures
Divine Science Publishing Assoc.
New York, 1917, 8th ed.
[99] Faith
is a conviction of the Truth. There are
several kinds of faith; live faith, which
is productive, and faith which is
negative, and therefore non-productive.
There is, too, an elected faith which is
pure. It is this faith the attainment of
which is the first step in the direction
of salvation. God fashioned the world
with it. It is the axis upon which the
universe has revolved ever since its
ordination as the spectacle of nature.
Without faith the world would collapse.
According to Paul, through faith we have
access to God; we stand by faith; we walk
by faith; we live by faith. “Now
faith is the substance of things hoped
for, the evidence of things not
seen.” “Through faith we
understand that the worlds were framed by
the word of God, so that things which are
seen, were not made of things which do
appear.”
Faith is
that act of the intellect by which we are
conscious of the things which are not
visible to the senses, the things which
are spiritual and eternal. Faith is
indispensable to life because it is the
substance of life. Nothing could be
accomplished from the winking of an eye
to the rotation of the earth on its axis
without faith. Faith, in truth, is an
impregnable wall of defense [100] against
error; it is the only remedy for war
which sets at naught law and truth; it
unwraps “the cloud of flesh”
in which all mankind is enveloped and
from “their senses their thick mist
unfold,” enabling the creation of
God to appear. Jesus attributed the cures
that he wrought to the faith of his
patients. Peter healed the “man
lame from his birth,” and the
cripple, “leaping up, stood and
walked--praising God,” and the
people “were filled with wonder and
amazement at that which had happened unto
him,” for the lame man was healed.
The people wondered, and Peter, seeing
their astonishment, said: “Ye men
of Israel, why marvel ye at this? Or why
look ye so earnestly on us, as though by
our own power or holiness we had made
this man to walk? It is his faith which
hath given him this perfect soundness in
the presence of you all”; his faith
in truth as represented by the name of
Jesus the Christ. Shakespeare says:
“Who would these fardles
bear
To grunt and sweat under a weary
life,
But that the dread of something after
death,
The undiscovered country, from whose
bourne
No traveler returns, puzzles the
will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we
have,
Than fly to others that we know not
of.”
But instead
it is not the fear of other ills that
unites mankind to life; it is his faith
in the continuity of life that
enables him to endure the vicissitudes
[101] of existence! It was not fear of
other ills that held the apostles to life
when “they were stoned, sawn
asunder, slain with the sword” as
they wandered “in deserts, and in
dens, and in caves of the earth.”
They were destitute, afflicted, tortured,
mocked, and scourged, as, sustained by
faith, they suffered and endured, while
waiting a better resurrection.
Surely men
who knew the presence of such torments
would not fear “ills” of
which they knew not. It is not the fear
of death “that makes cowards of us
all”; instead it is lack of faith
which causes “the native hue of
resolution to lose the name of
action.” Lack of faith in
righteousness is responsible for
wrongdoing.
It is said
that every drop of blood that is shed
calls forth a sea of tears; yet if one
man had had faith in the fact that to God
“belongeth vengeance and
recompense,” rivers of blood would
have been spared in these past three
years. So it is that men must have more
faith in peace to avert the horrors of
war, more faith in life to avert death,
and more faith in health to avoid
sickness. [102] When you fan the air
about you, fresh air immediately flows in
to take the place of that just
dissipated; in the same manner to drive
away doubt admit warm currents of
faith.
Faith is
essential to success in any and every
department of life. A man may have a gold
mine hidden in his cornfield, but unless
he has faith in its existence, he is
deprived of the use of the gold.
“It is only the finite that
suffers,” says Emerson; “the
Infinite lies stretched in smiling
repose,” and as we increase our
faith in our indissoluable connection
with the Supreme Self, the finite will
put on infinity and by so doing will
cease to suffer. In India, there is a
tree which is called the sacred Banyan,
and in Hindu symbolism it is the tree of
life. The branches of this tree bend to
the ground where they take root and form
new stocks, till they cover many hundred
feet in circumference. Every tree is a
whole made up of innumerable parts, each
of which is a likeness of the whole.
Through each separate tree, the life of
the whole circulates. It is thus with our
relation to Christ. We are included in
him, and he abides in us. We shall prove
this in proportion to our faith in the
truth of this divine relationship.
The
righteousness of Faith is sufficient to
confirm us in the knowledge that we live
and move and have our being in Christ.
Faith in this verity not only saves our
“soul” but it also saves our
bodies from the ravages of disease.
Faith is the
hub of the universe; it is the cause
[103] of which Hope--which is the bread
of life--is the idea. Without hope no man
can live. Hope is to life what the sun is
to its rays. When the noonday sun of
withering anguish would consume our
faith, hope is the precious dew that
comes down from heaven and revives it.
When we walk in the valley of the shadow
or perhaps linger in its gloom, it is
hope that sustains us through the
gloaming; it is hope that rolls away the
stone from the door of the tomb.
When the
ravages of despair would snatch reason
from a man it is hope that saves him from
himself. Jesus fed on hope. It was the
bread that came down from heaven and
nourished him in the gloom of his earthly
betrayal. Hope was the infinite power
that transmuted the ignominy of the
crucifixion into a glorious resurrection.
When the soul would “turn itself
back to re-behold the past, which never
yet a living person left,” it is
hope that leads the soul back to its
source in its search for truth. Lord
Byron said that if it were not for hope
the future would be in hell.
Hope, like a
light set upon a rock, averts many a
human shipwreck and directs mariners, who
are lost in the fog of doubt, back to the
right course. Dante has said that
spiritual healing is wrought by
“the living hope that places its
efficacy in prayers to God.”
Likewise, as the sunlight in the damp
woods coaxes tender and beautiful plants
out of the dark earth, so hope beguiles
from the dark recesses of the mind golden
talents [104] which would be hidden from
anything less far-seeing than hope.
Hope is a
mighty General, and her battles are won
without loss of men, for she conquers by
the force of right, rather than by
strife. “Everywhere,” says
Heine, “that a great soul gives
utterance to its thoughts, there is a
Golgotha,” and it may be well added
that where a crucifixion has not taken
place a savior has never been
resurrected. It is the cross out of which
the crown has been evolved, and he who
would wear a crown of rejoicing cannot
avoid bearing the cross.
Hope is
expressed in Love, and Love is born of
God. Therefore Love is eternal and
indestructible. It is the only Creator,
and it is the all of creation. It is the
force that holds the earth on its axis;
it is life’s sun in its completion.
Love is the most powerful thing in the
world. It is in subjection to nothing; it
is the ruler of the universe; it is the
all in all of life. Loves reigns in
heaven and rules on earth. “Many
waters cannot quench it, neither can the
floods drown it. If a man would give all
the substance of his house for Love, it
would utterly be condemned.” Love
knows not station. It is found equally
among the rich and the poor, the high and
the low, the learned and the ignorant. It
is the gift of God to all humanity. It is
the expression of which hope is the idea,
and of which faith is the cause. To
pervert one’s sense of Love is to
do violence to the Highest. To misdirect
the [105] application of one’s
sense of Love is to charge God with
caprice, cruelty and jealousy--for God is
Love. Love, therefore, is unchangeable
and incorruptible.
Men may
mistake passion for love and commit in
its name atrocious deeds and frightful
crimes, and then charge the account to
Love, but Love enthroned in the eternal
heaven of unity to too pure to behold
iniquity and thus it is never conscious
of anything outside of its own purity.
Love is life, and Love is death. These
seeming opposites are in reality one and
the same, for, in its ultimate meaning,
love is death, and in its last analysis
it is life. The greater love lays down
its life for its friend. Love, then, is
the highest form of humanity, and
humanity dies unto its human form to take
up its substance in Spirit.
“Perfect love casteth out
fear,” and death robbed of fear is
seen to be life. “Love is of God,
and every one that loveth is born of God
and knoweth God. He that loveth not,
knoweth not God; for God is love.”
Beloved, if God so loved us, we must love
one another. If any man say “'I
love God,' and he hateth his brother, he
is a liar.” That he who loveth God
must love his brother is the law of
Christ, who is God. We are told that
“they (the disciples) loved not
their lives unto the death,” and
the explanation to this verse is found in
Luke’s version, where Jesus,
talking of himself, tells the people of
his approaching death and says: “If
any man will come after me, let him deny
himself, and take up his cross daily
[106] and follow me. For whosoever will
save his life shall lose it: but
whosoever shall lose his life for my
sake, the same shall find it.”
Those who “loved not their lives
unto death” were those who
voluntarily exposed themselves to death
rather than deny their faith in God as
the only reality, hence it is in death
that the humanity of love is transmuted
to its primal divinity. Vain thoughts
about Love do not affect Love, nor do
they concern this divine substance which
“covereth all sins.” But they
seriously affect man, inasmuch as by
following the shadow of lust he loses the
substance of Love.
When men say
that they wage war for love of country
they deceive themselves, for they have
mistaken the lust of possession for the
love of country. When a man mistakes a
passion, jealous or otherwise, for love,
he has mistaken a shade for sunlight.
Love knows neither passion nor lust and
Love can never be defined as anything
more or less than Love.
The world
talks of love, but it does not understand
it, and therefore it is denied its
inheritance, the reign of peace. Love is
life; therefore to know love, we must
live it, in no other way can we
understand it. The love of righteousness
excludes the love of wrongdoing as
certainly as “one poison doth
exclude by kind another’s
force.”
When Jesus
and those of his disciples who understood
him laid down their lives, and their
tormentors ridiculed them while they were
crucifying [107] these great lovers of
humanity, neither Jesus nor his disciples
asked why fire from heaven did not
descend and kill these persecutors, or
why “to swallow” these
“the earth did not cleave
asunder.” Instead they realized
that the hearts of their tormentors
“were fertile land, although
unwrought by love,” and that verily
they knew not what they did. It is thus
that “every bondman bears in his
own hand the power to cancel his
captivity,” for Love is the
universal liberator.
Love is the
essence of life, and therefore we do not
live until we love. We talk of love, not
realizing of what we are talking;
“believing that they speak the
truth, and not believing” in that
which is true, namely Love. Therein lies
their “sin and shame.” We are
starving for love with love all about us;
“blind covetousness has cast its
spell upon us and has made us like unto a
little child who drives off its nurse and
dies of hunger.”
Light is
Love. We live and move and have our being
in Love, and its divine light “so
penetrates the universe according to its
merit that naught can be an obstacle
against it.” Not sleeping, we
nevertheless dream that there is a dearth
of Love on earth, when Love is Life, and
the earth is teeming with life, but
having eyes we see not. Your Lord, your
Christ, your God of Gods is Love. Love is
the “spirit divine which in the way
of going up, directs us without
asking.” Love is the divine healer
and the universal pardoner [108] of all
that is unlike good, for the love of
right causes mankind to forsake sin.
Tears are
Love’s pearls, and sorrow is her
crown; by the tears of sincere repentance
the sinner is washed “so white, no
snow unto that limit doth attain.”
Hate is powerless in Love’s
presence, and the “inward vultures
of avarice and greed” forsake their
prey and flee at Love’s
approach.
Next: Creation
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The Astor Lectures
Table of
Contents
(Formerly at
Northwoods Divine Science Resource
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