Page:Three Thousand Selected Quotations from Brilliant Writers.djvu/246

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238
FAITH IN GOD.

When in your last hour (think of this) all faculty in the broken spirit shall fade away, and sink into inanity—imagination, thought, effort, enjoyment—then will the flower of belief, which blossoms even in the night, remain to refresh you with its fragrance in the last darkness.


In faith and hope
Earth I resign;
Secure of heaven,
For I am Thine!

Zwingle.

FAITH IN GOD.

Faith, then, generically, is confidence in a personal being. Specifically, religious faith is confidence in God, in every respect and office in which He reveals Himself. As that love of which God is the object, is religious love, so that confidence in Him as a Father, a Moral Governor, a Redeemer, a Sanctifier, in all the modes of His manifestation, by which we believe whatever He says because He says it, and commit ourselves and all our interests cheerfully and entirely into His hands, is religious faith.


Faith is letting down our nets into the transparent deeps at the Divine command, not knowing what we shall take.


Faith is a grasping of Almighty power;
The hand of man laid on the arm of God;—
The grand and blessed hour in which the things impossible to me
Become the possible, O Lord, through Thee.