MEANING OF FAITH

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXI, Issue 21883, 20 August 1934, Page 12

MEANING OF FAITH

A VITAL INTUITION The profound subject of faith and its foundations was dealt with in an address delivered by the Rev. G. Jackson in the Town Hall concert chamber yesterday afternoon. The address was one of a series of public lectures on religious topics thrtt has been arranged by the Auckland Council of Christian Congregations. Mr. C. H. Furness presided over an attendance of about 200. "The Faith that Rebels" was Mr. Jackson's subject, and he explained that in using that phrase he was thinking of that splendid surmise of the human spirit which refused to be halted by things as they were and made a great leap into a world of reality that lay behind all appearances; because theTe, and there alone, was his native sphere and his divine destiny. The vital intuition which had led man to this seemed to be the most wonderful thing in human nature.

Faith was not a kind of mathematical intuition, but rather was it like a gradually developing consciousness comparable to a man's growing sense of beauty or of honour. Religious faith was at once a universal and an inveterate instinct in the human race, and that made it incredible that tho whole thing was an illusion, that there was no real substance in it. In His teaching about faith in God and in His practice of it, Jesus was absolutely unique among all tho great leaders of religion that history had known. God must be mightier and more loving and readier to help all men than any man had ever realised; and Jesus' put at the centre of His message the call to unbounded faith.