Not everyone gets such a personalized call to faith. Still, faith is a gift and can't be treated as if it were given, willy-nilly, to everyone. St. Augustine dealt with the apparent struggle between faith and reason in his time, too. In other words, without faith, there is no understanding. Well, a reader might say, that's easier said than done.
Someone has to have faith before believing.
For Augustine, it was never a matter of not having faith but of failing to believe. This is a point that has troubled believers and those who want to be believers. Jesus seems to be saying that if a person does not believe in the central message of Christianity, which is that God sent Jesus Christ into this world to save us, and if that person is not baptized, that person cannot have eternal life. Yet some people are denied the grace to believe. It is almost as if Jesus himself had taught a kind of predestination where God nullified our free will by deciding who would be given faith and who would not.