The Unity of Faith

If there be a typical trait of faith-an attitude of spirit or an act characteristic of it-this is certainly its simplicity. It is already observable in that indeterminate thing which we term the "religious sense' '; whatever may be its context, its forms, the act of the cleaving of man to the Divine is eminently simple. In the most complex souls, in those most burdened by analysis, who seem to us irremediably torn by passions, problems and agonies of inward conflict and distress, when once this shock has come out of nowhere to compel the proclamation of God . . . , a sort of polarisation comes into action. Under all the excesses, many-sidedness, and beyond superficial deployments, a directness, a spiritual purity, is cutting its way through in the search for freedom: a certain primitive and simple thing at the very root of our being has been touched.How much more so in faith! The religious factors which create this attitude of basic adhesion are transposed and "planted" in God Himself Who is the source and consummation of the entire change. No longer adoration grounded in the shivering dread of an annihilated creature, but communion in the life of a personal God by active "outpouring" of divine light interiorly.What paradox, then, to wish to analyse it, analyse this faith which, like life beneath the surgeon's scalpel, escapes us in proportion as analysis goes deeper!Must we leave it alone?-Let ourselves be involved in a sort of spiritual wave where, assent once given, we have to renounce every control, every recall to terra firma, under pain of falling into any kind of "rationalism"? Attractive, enduring temptation for the believer

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