The Manitowoc pilot. [volume] (Manitowoc, Wis.) 1859-1932, 1909-11-18

%PG 5'i
THE SALVATION OF FAITH.

By Henry T. Cope.
Faith without work is dead
James ii, 20.
The religion of creed has failed to
accomplish the things it set before 1t;
let the religion Of deed be tried The
difference between the two is tremen-
dous, yet the transition is not SO
great as we sometimes think; the one
kills an ideal at it's roots by express
ing it only in creed. in theory; the
other carries creed out to its full
ness by expressing it in practice.
Once the great aim Of religious en-
deavor was to bring all men to church
adherence, to confession, of one or the
other of the faiths We have been
working at that for centuries, and
there remains just about as much real
sin in the world as ever; there re-
mains as much unnecessary misery, as
much injustice and wrong The world
is far from being saved.
The founder of Christianity taught
men to be patient, meek, peacemakers,
pure in heart, neighborly, sincere, just,
loyal to their best ideals. His follow
ers could not content themselves with
things as simple as these. They sought
out subtleties; they taught men to dis
pute over historical and traditional
data; they proclaimed that men would
be saved by faith in metaphysical mys-
teries.
There remain to-day many who call
themselves preachers of the gospel
whose good news consists in thls-that
men have only to force themselves into
mental anasthesia to accept this or
the other fact or tradition, and they
will have accomplished the will of the
Most High, they will have saved their
own souls. What moral universe
this must be where the one great thing
required Is that men should believe
something they often can know moth
ing about.
To tell the liar and thief. the moral
bankrupt and the social outlaw that
the great Judge Of all requires OF them
nothing more than that they should
believe some chapter in history or
some theory in celestial psychology
may have, indeed, the sound of good
news to them. 1t means a cheap and
easy escape from the terrors of the
law without the rigor Of justice.
That kind of salvation by that kind
of faith simply puts the moral nature
to sleep. 1t makes possible the man
who is all right in his faith but all
wrong in his works; who is sure that
he is right with Cod" but who is
certainly wrong with men, who is in
flexible in creed but strangely elastic
In conscience.
The things he believes may be right
in themselves; that is of little impor-
lance compared with the matter of the
fruitage Of his belief, whether his con-
victions are SO great, so vital and so
related to life that, their roots going
into the depths of the SOUL their fruits
appear in all his acts and relations.
The insistence Of Jesus and other
religious teachers on faith was not be-
cause convictions, creed, if you will
some kind of deep seated faith is final
but because it Is fundamental; it is
that from which all actions spring, and
1t IS dead in itself without such fruit
age in deed
The creed that saves the world is
that which underlies right action, that
which burns itself into the depths of
man and forces him to follow the
truth, to serve the right. to battle
wrong, to succor need to give all he
has, even life itself, for noble deeds
It Is the creed so vital that 1t Is too
busy realizing itself ever to have time
to analyze itself.
Do you believe in goodness, right,
justice, love, truth, enough to choose
them when they do not seem to pay;
to prefer death to their undoing? Not
do you admire them, but do you follow
them? That is the faith that saves
the world, that overcomes wrong and
purges from sin, and makes real in all
human society the life and ideals Of
the worlds greatest religious prophet,
the Man of Nazareth.