The Fight of Faith Author:Stopford Augustus Brooke Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: III. THE GROUND AND GROWTH OF FAITH. July 25, 1875. " And Jesus said unto them, Because of your unbelief: for verily I say unto you, If ye have faith as a ... more »grain of mustard seed, ye shall say unto this mountain, Remove hence to yonder place ; and it shall remove ; and nothing shall be impossible unto you."—Matthew xvii. 20. O one can lay down more strongly than Christ does in my text the power of faith. The smallest grain of it will enable a man to remove a mountain, and cast it into the sea. Of course, by the very nature of the thing spoken of, the phrase is poetical. Faith is a spiritual quality, and the work it does is spiritual and not material; spiritually done in men's hearts, not in the material world. Christ spoke as a poet speaks, and even the minds of the Apostles, literal enough in other matters, did not imagine that He was literal here. They were Orientals, and such phraseology was common. He who has faith can remove mountains, can achieve that which seems impossible— lift the mightiest obstacles and cast them into the sea. And if we have faith in God, the Father of men, and in the eternal life of progress which we possess in Him, we shall say unto the mountains that stand in the way of humanity, " Be removed and cast into the sea," and they will obey us. But to have this faith is just the difficulty ; and it is even difficult to define what it is, how far, and to what point it goes. The ground of faith in God and immortality is not authority or demonstration, but our sense of right. It is not authority, because that supposes the very point in question. It is to argue in a circle to say that God bids us believe in Him and therefore that we must do it. It is equally strange to say that the Church bids us believe in God and therefore that we are bound to do...« less