Page:What Religion Is (1920).djvu/24

Rh remain what we are, and yet enter into something new. The peculiar attitude in which this is effected is religious faith. And this is, as I see the matter, just what we mean by religion — this, and no more, but nothing less. It is faith which is contrasted, not with knowledge, but with sight. All the resources of knowledge may contribute to faith. But faith is contrasted with sight, because it is essential to it that we rise into another world while remaining here.

Religious faith has two inseparable sides of will and of judgement. They are hardly indeed sides, for each has the other in it. Both mean absorption in a good such that nothing else matters and nothing else is real. This is why religion “justifies” the religious man. It does not abolish his finiteness — his weakness and his sin. But what it does is to make him deny that they are real — to make his whole being, as he accepts