Page:The church, the schools and evolution.djvu/68

 from the facts seen that such a Being is to be trusted, and active faith thereby becomes the outgrowth of that kind of reasoning. That is, the faith that begins as an attitude of willingness toward the will of God, through which attitude the eyes are touched into a vision of the character of God, such a faith comes into and continues in an active submission to that will through the normal functioning of reason.

This shows the vital difference between reasoning and rationalizing, and the relation of each to faith. The effect of reasoning on faith is constructive, while that of rationalizing is destructive. And the heart of the difEerence between the two traces back, in the last analysis, to those two kinds of vision. The rationalist, unyielding to the touch of God on his vision, sees only natural facts, and even then he sees them only partially and wholly out of relation to the spiritual revelation of God in the Bible and in Christ; and thinking that he sees discrepancies between the facts in the natural realm and the statements of Scripture, his reason leads him to reject the Bible as infallible and inerrant, thereby making faith in the God of the Bible utterly impossible. His reasoning powers are simply functioning normally when he concludes to reject the statements about the facts that to him are entirely unseen which do not seem to agree with what he sees. His trouble is not with his reasoning powers but with his vision. Refusing to see what he is passing judgment on, his method of inquiry is rationalizing.

But the believer, utterly yielded to God and therefore seeing Him through anointed eyes in both the written and the living Word, thus seeing the infinite perfections of His character, is led by the normal