How about proof? The Pontius Pilates of modern life are almost as numerous as are educated men; and each one, in the self-sufficiency of his own intellectual penetration and tacit belief in his own infallibility of judgment, listens to the recitation of any new natural fact or of any apparently incredible story with a final exclamation by which he thinks to prove his wisdom: "Where are your proofs?" It sounds so reasonable; but the slightest knowledge of the processes of human understanding, were that only exercised, would show to these self-wise skeptics that there is no proof outside of man himself.
As a matter of fact, what is 'proof'? Is proof something that exists outside of one? If so, how could it be understood? No; all proof lies within one's own self. When the mind is so swayed by the preponderance of evidence and testimony that it automatically assents to a proposition, then the case for that mind is proved. Another stronger mind may require stronger proof based on a larger field of more cleverly presented evidence and testimony; yet in all cases, proof is the bringing of conviction to the mind; and hence a man who cannot see the force, both internal and external, of evidence or testimony, or who sees it but feebly, will say that the proposition is not proved or insufficiently proved; and so forth. But this skeptical attitude does not disprove the proof, so to say, but merely shows that the mind in question here is incapable of receiving what to another and perhaps quicker and brighter intellect is clear enough to establish the case, and hence, to that intellect the proof is amply sufficient.
Is proof therefore infallible? Pray pause a moment over this question which so infrequently occurs even to thinking men. The answer is obvious. No. If it were then he who offers and he who accepts proof would likewise and equally be infallible. How many men have died innocent of the crime for which they were convicted in courts of law, because the evidence was apparently conclusive against them, 'proved' to the minds of the judge and jurors who tried the cases! They were condemned and the sentence duly carried out. These are cases in which the crimes were proved against innocent men; because the evidence was there and was duly submitted; there were, apparently, no missing links or lacunae in the chain of evidence, and therefore to the jurors the crimes were proved. The minds of the jurors were swayed and completely controlled by the evidence; yet in the cases alluded to, showing the fallibility of established proof, these jurors sent innocent fellow human beings to an infamous death.
Here we refer to courts of law alone because the argument there becomes clear and obvious enough; and while conviction of the innocent does indeed occur there, how much more often do the innocent suffer in the affairs of daily life! These latter cases occur with appalling frequency, even daily one might say. From what we see, from what we hear, from what we know or believe, by the working of our prejudices and in other ways, our minds are swayed, our judgment is over-ruled, our discrimination is warped, our instincts of compassion have no longer room in which to work freely, and we condemn. We feel that the case is proved; and it may be years afterwards before we finally learn that we have wrongly judged despite our sincerity and earnestness of desire to abstain from hasty and unfair conclusions. To us those cases were proved, proved to the hilt, as the saying goes, and yet we later find we were all wrong.
Let us then beware not merely of an uncharitable heart and of a biased mind, but likewise of mere 'proof' which so strongly sways both mind and heart. There is only one true guide in life, and that guide is the inner voice which grows stronger and ever more emphatic with cultivation and exercise of it, telling us: "This is true; that is false." In the beginning we hear this silent voice and recognise its clear clarion tones but faintly, and call it a 'hunch' or an intuition, which indeed it is. There is nothing except our own stupidity and the overweening consciousness we have in the righteousness of our own set opinions, which prevents us from cultivating this noblest of inner monitors more perfectly than we do. Egoism and vanity are two of the most formidable stumbling-blocks in the cultivation of these marvelous inner springs of the spirit-soul, whence streams the flow of intuition. Those springs belong to the impersonal and therefore purely unselfish part of us. Their flow which is like the quick and silent coming of light, will appear to us at first like the intimations or intuitions of the coming of a messenger, whose footsteps over the distant hilltops we may not hear at first, though inwardly we know that he is coming, coming, coming; and then finally we see the presence and recognise the intimations of the approaching truth which our inner nature gives forth to us in unceasing streams.
This is what is really meant by 'true faith.' As Paul of the Christians says: "Faith [or instinctive knowledge] is the reality of things hoped for [intuitively discerned], the evidence of things invisible." (2)
This is not blind faith. Blind faith is mere credulity, believing what one is told only because someone tells it, someone who is trusted perhaps, or perhaps because it happen to please at the moment. There is a very famous example of the working of blind faith in the writings of the fiery Church-Father, Tertullian. Inveighing against Marcion, who was a very eminent Gnostic teacher, he speaks as follows:
The only possible means that I have to prove myself impudent successfully, and a fool happily, is by my contempt of shame. For instance, I maintain that the very Son of God died; now this is a thing to be accepted, because it is a monstrous absurdity; further, I maintain that after he was buried, he rose again; and this I believe to be absolutely true because it is absolutely impossible. (3)
Declarations of this kind would have indeed no effect whatsoever on any well-balanced mind, were it not for the fact that there is in them a tacit or unspoken appeal to the contrarieties and contradictions and amazing surprises in life, all which arise merely because we are not under the beneficent and benign influence of our higher nature. Were we so, these contrarieties and contradictions which make us doubt our own reason and sanity sometimes, and all the rest of the panoply of the lower self, would never manifest at all, and such wildly illogical contradictions as those Tertullian allowed his mind to be swayed by, would have no such easy sway over credulous minds. A man who will say that because a thing is absolutely impossible, which is the same as saying absolutely untrue, it is therefore absolutely true, is simply playing ducks and drakes with his own reason and with the springs of inner consciousness; the boldness of the absurd declaration is its only force.
When an honest man will allow his judgment to be so biased and swayed that his mind thereby becomes a battlefield of conflicting theories and emotions, which he nevertheless manages to hold together by opinionative will-power, he is indeed, intellectually speaking, in a pitiful state; and this is the invariable result of mere blind faith. True faith, contrariwise, is the intuitive and clear discernment of reality, the inner recognition of things that are invisible to the physical eye.
The time will inevitably come -- we cannot escape its coming -- when the entire human race will know this sublime truth; and in those days the men and women who have run the race of evolution faster than their fellows have done, will then stand as Masters of Life, with a conscious knowledge of the truths of being, working henceforward as actual conscious agents in the Cosmic Labor, and no longer the mere tide-driven flotsam on the ocean of life, as most human beings today actually are. No wonder that Pythagoras spoke of the latter as 'the living dead,' living indeed in the lower principles of their constitution, but dead to the Divinity within themselves.
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