Hinderances to Correct Judgment: The Pride of Human Intellect

One of the favorable effects of faith on the exercise of the judgment is, that it is adverse to the pride of human intellect. When we speak of faith in God, we mean God as he is; not a God who is dwindled down to the compass of man’s imagination, but God as he is; God illimitable, God omnipotent, God who reveals himself in every thing that is made, but who in every thing that is made indicates also that there is something not revealed, and something which cannot be revealed. The pride of human intellect cannot stand in the light of such a presence. The man of true religious faith, the man who has faith, not in the idol of his own imagination, but in God as he is, reverting from the Infinite Mind to his own mind, begins at once to feel that he has no intellectual strength, no true wisdom, no purity of love, and no foundation of hope, except what he derives from a divine source. “The most enlightened of men,” says Robert Hall, “have always been the first to perceive and acknowledge the remaining obscurity, which hung around them; just as, in the night, the further a light extends, the wider the surrounding sphere of darkness appears. Hence it has always been observed, that the most profound inquirers into nature have been the most modest and humble.

Philosophers need faith. And some of them, who have sustained a distinguished rank, Pascal, Leibnitz, Boyle, Newton, Locke, Edwards, Cudworth, and others, have not hesitated to recognize this need. They need faith, not merely that they may in this manner obtain strength to prosecute their inquiries; but that they may possess that true humility, which has just been mentioned as characteristic of profound inquirers, and which, checking the arrogance of nature, will enable them to stop at the right point. The person, who has faith in God as God, not merely as a being exalted but as a Being Infinite, sees clearly, and may be said perhaps to have a sort of instinctive perception or feeling, that there is something in God which man does not know, and which it is not possible for him to know. And as a consequence of this, inasmuch as God is in every thing and as every thing is dependent on God, there is something in every object of inquiry, a line of demarcation, a limit between what can be known and what cannot be known, which baffles forever the efforts of human cognition. No matter what the object is. It may be the simplest thing in nature; it may be the vernal leaf or the summer flower, the morning dew or the noon-day sun-beam. The known and the unknown lie there together; that which may be comprehended by the finite, and that which can be known only by the Infinite. The philosopher, who has faith, being taught of God, understands this. But the philosopher, if we may call him such, who has not faith, dashes proudly against the barrier, which constitutes the limit of human knowledge, and proposes, with a hardihood but little short of blasphemy, to explain on philosophical principles the process of making or unmaking God himself. But he has gone beyond his strength. His problems and his theories, his flights of fancy and his concatenated reasonings, all lie overturned and in broken fragments at his feet. He stands confounded. And others see, and happy will it be, if he himself sees, that the foolishness of God is wiser than the wisdom of men.

— From The Life of Faith, Part 2, Chapter 10.