that the object is already the identity of God and man, but man does not include me: that object is not in me, it is only for me; it remains an object, and I remain outside. And for the religious consciousness the problem is, How can I be reconciled with this will which is not mine?
And the answer is that in the object the reconciliation of the divine and human is real; the principle is there already; and in its reality, the reality of the reconciliation of the human as such, is ideally contained my reconciliation. Yes, mine is there if only I can take hold of it, if only I can make it my own; but how with the sin that adheres to me can this ever be? How can the human-divine ideal ever be my will?
The answer is, Your will it never can be as the will of your private self, so that your private self should become wholly good. To that self you must die, and by faith be made one with the ideal. You must resolve to give up your will, as the mere will of this or that man, and you must put your whole self, your entire will, into the will of the divine. That must be your one self, as it is your true self; that you must hold to both with thought and will, and all other you must renounce; you must both refuse to recognize it as yours, and practically with your whole self deny it. You must believe that you too really are one with the divine, and must act as if you believed it. In short, you must be justified not by works but solely by faith. This doctrine, which Protestantism, to its eternal glory, has made its own and sealed with its blood, is the very centre of Christianity; and, where you have not this in one form or another, there Christianity is nothing but a name.
In mere morality this faith is impossible. There you have not a real unity of the divine and human, with which to identify yourself; and there again the self, which is outside the ideal, is not known as unreal, and can not be, since the ideal is not all reality.
But what is faith? It is perhaps not an easy question to answer, but in some sort it must be answered; and to neglect it as worthless, or stand aloof from it as a mystery, are both wrong positions. It is easy to say what faith is not. It is not mere belief, the simple holding for true or fact; it is no mere theoretic
