THE MORALS OF BELIEF.

THERE is hardly any subject on which good men differ more widely than this which I have chosen as the subject of my discourse this morning, The Morals of Belief. On the one hand, we hear continually about the sin of unbelief; we hear it asserted that this is the greatest of all sins; that even doubt is criminal. On the other hand, we hear it said that a man is not responsible for his belief; that he cannot believe what he wishes to believe or wills to believe, and therefore that belief can be no virtue and unbelief no sin. "See," say these last, "there are good men in all the churches. There are good Romanists as well as Protestants; good Universalists as well as Calvinists; good Christians as well as good Buddhists and Mohammedans. Therefore it makes no difference what a man believes." Now which of these positions shall we accept, or what modification of either, or compromise between the two, should neither, taken by itself, prove to be entirely satisfactory?

And that neither will prove so to the majority of you whom I address I am quite confident, if you will attend for a few moments to a few obvious considerations. First, as to the sin of unbelief, and whether it is the greatest sin of which a

man is capable. The second proposition need not be considered if we conclude that there is no such sin. And this is what we must conclude, if we consider well what we are speaking of. For sin is a matter of the will, but belief is a matter of the intellect. It is therefore, strictly speaking, as absurd to speak of the sin of unbelief as it would be to speak of a yellow noise, or of hearing a smile, as Mrs. Browning does, or of doing any thing with one sense which can only be done with another. But as the impressions upon one sense may be correlated with impressions on another sense, as the sound of thunder with the sight of lightning, so may the impressions of the intellect be correlated with the action of the will; and so while there cannot, strictly speaking, be any such thing as the sin of unbelief, there may be unbelief, and belief too, for that matter,-which is the result and sign of an immoral will submitting to its baser inclinations. But if belief as well as unbelief can be the result and sign of an immoral will, evidently we have disposed forever of all this talk about "the sin of unbelief," as if unbelief in itself were necessarily sinful or even the sign of an anterior sinfulness. Side by side there may be belief and unbelief, and the belief may be the result and sign of greater sin than the unbelief. For example, some man in the community is accused of having committed a heinous crime. John believes him guilty; James does not. But why does John believe him guilty? Because, perhaps, being a bad man himself, it is easy for him to believe badness of others. And why does James

believe him innocent? Because, being a good man himself, it is easy for him to believe in goodness. In both cases I say perhaps. It may be that John has sufficient reasons for his belief, James not for his unbelief. But the illustration is sufficient proof that unbelief may be the result and sign of sinfulness; belief, the sign of moral purity and nobleness.

But it is also proof of something else which bears equally hard upon men's notion of the sin of unbelief, viz., that belief and unbelief are always convertible terms. Thus, in the case we have imagined—a man accused of having committed some heinous crime-John believes him guilty; James does not. Putting it in this way, John is the believer, James the unbeliever. But put it James believes him innocent, John does not: James is the believer, John the unbeliever. And put it either way, it is really James who believes in the man and only doubts the proposition of his guilt. Therefore the formal unbelief may prove a real belief in something greater: belief in the man being much greater than belief in the mere proposition of his guilt. May it not be so frequently in theological discussions? That it is so in regard to belief and unbelief being convertible terms there cannot be a moment's doubt. Relatively to Calvin, Servetus was an unbeliever. Relatively to Servetus, Calvin was an unbeliever. The orthodox are as heterodox to me as I am to them. Precisely. I do not believe what they do; they do not believe what I do. So far it is an even thing. But now comes in the second part of our

above consideration. We found that James was the real believer even when doubting the proposition in dispute. He believed in the greater fact, viz., the man. So in our theological controversies (as I once tried to show in a discourse upon the question, Who are the Infidels?). Those are called unbelievers who do not believe in the depravity of human nature, in the incarnation and atonement of Jesus Christ, in the supernatural inspiration of the Bible. But here in every

case the unbeliever believes more than the believer. He believes in the intellectual and moral sanity of human nature, in the universal incarnation of the Infinite, in the universal atonement of suffering, in the natural inspiration of the human mind proving itself in many books and many ages of the world, proving itself gloriously in the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures. At every point, what he believes in is the broader, nobler, sweeter, more inspiring doctrine. His relative infidelity is but the mask of faith; while the relative belief of his opponent is but the mask of an essential and not merely formal infidelity. The popular religionist does not so much believe in God or man as he believes certain current and traditional statements about them. The rationalist does not believe any of these statements, but he believes in God and man. Who are the Infidels?

But while the largeness and the beauty and the strength and sweetness of the thing believed in may be, and ought to be, the test of men's essential faith or infidelity, they cannot be the test of sin or virtue, of the character of those who hold