The Perfect Faith # 2

The Perfect Faith # 2

This is the first relation between character and conduct. Conduct utters and declares character; but we very soon find that this is not their only relation. It is through conduct that I know first what character is. I cannot enter into the knowledge of character in any other way; but when I have once entered into a knowledge of character through my perception of conduct, then something else occurs which it is very interesting and often very beautiful to watch. By and by I come to know character, to which conduct has first introduced me, by itself; and in its turn it becomes the interpreter of other conduct, so that I, who first knew what a man was by what he did, come afterwards to understand the things he does by the knowledge of what he is to which I have attained.

Does this seem obscure? But it is what each of you is doing every day. Your life touches another man's life in some of the many varied contacts of the world, - you live beside him, you do business in the same street and watch how he behaves, you see that he does honest deeds, that he resists temptations to dishonesty; by and by when your convictions about his conduct have become very clear; after you have watched him for a long time, you go behind his conduct to his character. You say not merely, "He does honest things;" you say, "The man is honest." You not merely know his acts, his nature. To know a nature is an exercise of your faculties different different from what it would be to know facts. It involves deeper powers in you, and is a completer action of your life. It is thus that, going on through his honest conduct to his character, you have come to know your friend's honest self. And now suppose he does some act which puzzles you. The world shakes its head at him and calls his act dishonest. You yourself do not see the clew by which to understand it. But suppose you are so sure he is honest that not even the strange and puzzling circumstances of this act can shake you. You say, "I know that he is honest and so this cannot be a cheat." Such a degree of confidence is possible; in many cases it is perfectly legitimate. Each of you has that degree of confidence in some one of your fellow men. When such a confidence in character exists, do you not see what a circuit you have made? You began with the observation of conduct which you could understand; through that, you entered into knowledge of personal character; from knowledge of character you came back to conduct, and accepted actions which you could not understand. You have made this loop, and at the turn of the loop stands character. It is through character that you have passed from the observation of conduct which is perfectly intelligible into the acceptance of conduct which you cannot understand, but of which you know only who and what the man was that did it.

All this is quite familiar. And we can see how necessary some such progress of relation to our fellowmen must be. We can see how limited our life would be if we could never pass through study of their actions into confidence in the characters of the men with whom we have to do. Every man would always be on trial. We should always be testing even our dearest friends. Indeed, there could be no such thing as dear friendship; for friendship implies communion with and confidence in character. We should look at the last act of our companion with whom we had kept company for scores of years with the same suspicious and watchful scrutiny with which we examine the first things which a new acquaintance does. Anyone can see how sterile this would make our whole association with our fellow-men. The best that is in any man is locked away until you trust him. When the first scrutiny is over; when you have satisfied yourself that the man whom you are dealing with thinks wisely and means generously; when, having first made his actions a key to his character, you have come to make his character a key to his actions, - then you begin to get the real benefit of whatever richness and helpfulness of nature there may be in him.

And now we want to carry all this over to our thought of God, and see how it supplies the key to that great utterance of faith which is in our text, - "Though He slay me, yet will I trust Him." It is from God's treatment of any man that that man learns God. What God does to him, that is what first of all he knows of God. "His creation, preservation, and all the blessings of this life," the tendency, the evident tendency of God's conduct toward him to make him good and happy, - that is the first revelation which he meets. That revelation we can imagine as stopping short with itself, and becoming the whole religion of a man. The man might say, "Yes, I see, the sun is bright. I feel the air is soft and gentle. I recognize that the whole world is tempting me to honest and industry and purity. God is feeding me,body and soul, and I take His food and thank Him for it. "That might be all. The man might get no farther than just that bare acceptance of treatments of God, each one of which, separately taken up and criticized, challenged his approval and made him see that it was good. And evidently, if that were all, if the man had really not gone beyond that, there would be no ground on which the man should, nay none on which he could, accept any treatment of God which appeared him harsh or unwise. If the air roughened or the sun grew dim, or if the world tempted him to evil instead of enticing him to good, he, holding God always on trial, judging God anew by each new treatment he received, must of necessity be thrown off from God by each new disappointment. He could not help it. The moment God's conduct went against his judgment, he must disown God.

~Phillips Brooks~

(continued with # 3)