George MacDonald: Faith, the Proof of the UnseenGeorge MacDonald: Faith, the 
Proof of the Unseen 
Preached in Brixton Congregational Church, Last Sunday Morning, June 1882
Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. 

--Hebrews 11:1



I read it to you as it is down here, but as it stands it never conveyed any idea 
to my mind at all, and I am very glad it is altered in the Revised Version, for, 
of all things if we are Christians--having the least claim to the name--it is 
with the spirit and not the letter that we have to do; and this translation has 
neither the letter nor spirit. Happy ought the man to be who finds the ark 
things in the dear Book cleared up for him--to find that what had been as a 
pebble under his feet was a nut with a kernel in it, a life in it, a power of 
growth planted within his spirit. The true heart goes to the blessed Book not as 
an idolater but as a disciple; not to worship the Book, but to learn the will of 
Him who made the Book, and that has made His Spirit to understand the Book.
But I am going to talk to you this morning about the faith that is here spoken 
of. We have been talking about faith ever since the Lord came. It is not 
exhausted yet; and God forbid that I should know yet what faith is; although I 
know a little what it is. I think the meaning of the phrase is this: Faith is 
the foundation, the root, the underlying substance of hope. If you have any 
hope, it comes from some faith in you. Hope, you may say, is a bud upon the 
plant of faith, a bud from the root of faith; the flower is joy and peace.
Now the evidence of things not seen--I cannot, as I say, find any meaning in 
that at all; but the true meaning is the most profound fact in human history; it 
is the trial or the proving of things not seen.
Now upon that turns the life of every man, especially, perhaps, in the present 
day. This thing of faith means the whole recognized fellowship of man to God and 
His fellows; it is the right position of the human soul which is made to 
understand the truth-- the right position of that soul towards the truth; that 
is faith, partly. But you must remember that whenever you begin to speak of 
anything true, divine, heavenly, beyond the human, you cannot speak of it at all 
without speaking in some measure wrongly about it. We have no words, we have no 
phrases, we have no possible combination of sentences--nay, we have no forms of 
intellect that do more than represent fragmentarily the greatness of the things 
that belongs to the very vital being of our nature. Much, much foolish talk has 
been uttered about faith. Oh, this talking, friends. I would not trouble myself 
to set your opinions all right from this moment, henceforth, and for ever. I 
would not get up into the pulpit and do so. I do not think it is worth any man's 
labour; but if I could stir up a single soul, instead of talking about the 
meaning even of the greatest things, to go and do the smallest duty, I should 
say that is the kind of duty for which Christ spent Himself. If you read His 
life wisely you will see that His constant effort is to turn a man's thought 
back to himself, and make him do a thing, and not talk about it. About faith 
they often used to say that it was antithetically opposed to works. There never 
was greater nonsense. They would say that Paul taught faith and St. James taught 
works--and indeed one would feel something like this sometimes--that St. Paul 
had gone too far and that St. James had to write that epistle to set him right. 
It is not any of us, friends, that will find St. Paul or St. James wrong, nor 
was there the smallest difference between them. On the contrary, I assert that 
faith is simply the greatest work that man can do. Taking it in its simplest, 
original development, it is the highest effort of the whole human intellect, 
imagination, will, in the highest direction. Never does the human nature put 
forth itself in such power, with such effort, with such energy as to have faith 
in God. I say it is the highest, and sometimes the most difficult, work that a 
man can do.
Then, that is attended by thousands and thousands of other works of faith. In 
the present state of England's history--and we may add that of several other 
countries to it--it seems as if it were more difficult to believe than ever it 
was before. It seems also--I may say seems--it seems also to many people, and 
some people in certain moods, as if there was less faith in the world than ever 
there was before. And when they look in their own hearts--even those who would 
feign rank themselves among believers they recognise there an amount of doubt, 
difficulty, and fear that appals themselves. What?! Is the whole thing going to 
vanish like "the baseless fabric of a vision"?--all this story of Christ, His 
life and death, and the conquests that were made in His name--is it all going 
out of sight; and are we to be left where the world was before He came? I should 
like to help some of you, if I can, friends, about all this. It troubles some of 
your hearts; and some of you, perhaps, ought to be a little more troubled about 
it than you are, because it lies at your door in some measure; but I should like 
if, ,on the minds of young men particularly--although there is sad enough ground 
for including young women, too--if I could impress upon them that, let the thing 
look to them as it may, it is a notion and a false idea of Christianity that has 
come into their minds, partly because their own doors were opened narrow, partly 
because their own aspirations were so low, partly because they have been so 
little in earnest for the truth; it is about to vanish away and must perish; but 
the true thing--God's notion of it; what Christ thought and felt while He was 
here; what He thinks and feels now when He is here still--is that which shall 
never pass away but is the true fountain of truth and life to all the 
generations. But first of all let me say a word to the man or woman who is 
troubled with the difficulty of believing. Now-a-days, there is such a talk 
about science, and such a contempt poured forth on the man who thinks to walk 
without that kind of science for the guide of his life, who has a different 
goal, a different ambition, whose thoughts stretch further than the things of 
this life--the things he sees and hears and handles--if there be such a man 
among us, friends, who does the work of the world, and does it well, but his 
head is in heaven--that is the kind of thing we ought all to be an to seek. And 
there are perhaps a few even now of this kind, and there are more growing. But 
let me say to you about your own fears and doubts and difficulties--it is a 
great thing to believe. Are you fit to believe? I have just said that I believe 
it to be the loftiest exercise of the human being and of human nature. How can 
you expect to believe? Are you like Nathanial--an Israelite indeed, a man 
without guile? What are your ways? What have you been about? What are your 
desires in life? How have you been ordering yourself? If it may be that although 
the power of God upon you makes you feel that you ought to believe, that you are 
such that you cannot believe, and it is your own fault. Fully do I recognise the 
difficulty. I question if there is a doubt or a sense of difficulty that 
prevails now that has not passed through my own mind as a thing to be 
encountered and understood and settled. It is natural that we should doubt, with 
such cries especially on all sides of us, and the intellect so much more awake 
than ever it was before, and indeed the conscience not more asleep than before; 
and with one on this side and one on that side crying out, "I have reached, I 
have seen, and I have found no God." Settle this with yourselves to begin with. 
Not all the intellect or metaphysics of the world could prove that there is no 
God, and not all the intellect in the world could prove that there is a God. If 
you could prove that there is a God, that would imply that you could go all 
around Him, and buttress up his being with your human argument that He should 
exist. As soon might a child on his mother's bosom, looking up into his mother's 
face, write a treatise on what a woman was and what a mother was.
But do not think that God is angry with you because you find it hard to believe. 
It is not so; that is not like God; God is all that you can honestly wish Him to 
be, and infinitely more; He is not angry with you for that. And He knows 
perfectly well what the scientific man calls truth--although you will observe 
that he is always constantly, and everywhere changing his theories--that what 
the scientific man calls truth is simply an impossibility with regard to God; 
And God knows it. Your brain, the symbol of your intellect, cannot, concerning 
Him, if He exists, receive that kind of proof which you have when you read a 
proposition of Euclid. It commends itself to your mind and your understanding. 
You say, "So it is, and it cannot be otherwise." But you cannot receive that 
kind of; there is no such proof with regard to the Mighty God. And therefore I 
say if you doubt the existence of the living God, He is not angry with you for 
that. But I am speaking of those who would fain believe if they could, I ask 
you, have you been trying the things not seen? Have you been proving them? This 
is what God puts in your hands. He says, " I tell you I Am. You act upon that; 
for I know that your conscience moves you to it; you act upon that and you will 
find whether I Am or not, and what I Am." Do you see? Faith in its true sense 
does not belong to the intellect alone, nor to the intellect first, but to the 
conscience, to the will, and that man is a faithful man who says "I cannot prove 
that there is a God, but, O God, if Thou hearest me anywhere, help me to do Thy 
will." There is faith, "Do this," and he does it. It is o, friends, that is 
faith; it is doing that thing which you, let me say, even only suppose to be the 
will of God; for if you are wrong, and do it because you think it is His will, 
He will set you right. It is the turning of the eye to the light; it is the 
sending of the feet into the path that is required, putting the hands to do the 
things which the conscience says ought to be done. You will notice that all this 
chapter from which I have taken the text is a list of people that did things. 
Some of them were made kings, and some of them were sawn asunder for it; but it 
was all for faith, and nothing but faith. There was a truth; there was a live 
truth; a truth that had welled through and called the knowledge of truth up in 
us, nay, called up in us the very possibility of feeling truth; and according to 
this law these men walked through all the world, and all the worlds together set 
themselves against them, and in the name of the original vital law of the 
universe-- namely, the living God--they walked right on and met their fate. Yes; 
victory and the participation of the Divine nature, that was their faith.
Therefore, friends, the practical thing is just this, and it is the one lesson 
that we have to learn, that whatever our doubts or difficulties, we must do the 
thing we know in order to learn the thing we do not know; but whether we learn 
it or not, "If ye know these things," saith the Master, "happy are ye if you do 
them." It is the doing that is everything, and the doing is faith and there is 
no division between them.
Then I would say a word to those who are further on. They have been trying to 
serve God for many years now, they do not seem to themselves to have made much 
of it. They find that they are still troubled in their soul--not whether they be 
of God; but does he manage everything now? "Where is He? I have never seen Him; 
if He would but speak to myself! I have been crying for Him for all these years, 
and I have never had a sign out of the great blank. Oh, if He would but show 
Himself; if He would but do something--give me the meanest sign that He actually 
is, and that He cares about me." You say, "I feel as if I could go and on for 
ever then." Friends, I believe there is no sign God could give you, but what you 
would begin to doubt again. I do not believe there is any miracle He could work 
before your eyes even, that by-and-by you would not begin to doubt, and be just 
as lost as before. God will not give us little things to spoil our appetite for 
great things. God will never be content until we are one with Him as He is one 
with Christ; God will not give us signs and wonders and these inferior things, 
for be sure God's common and usual way is far better than His miraculous way, as 
we call it; If it were all miracle, we would make it all common. You may be sure 
then, that God's usual way of doing things is the best way. I say He will not 
give us signs of anything outside to give us confidence in Him. Nothing will 
serve God turn but this--that our faith in Him shall be complete, go instantly 
with our perception of what He is. It is by the vision in our souls, the feeling 
and perception in our souls of what God is, that we are able to believe in Him. 
Let a man once see God as Christ saw Him, and he believes. He does not see Him 
perfectly,and his faith will never be absolutely complete until he comes to that 
point when he recognises the character and being and relation of God to himself; 
and then he believes; and any glimmer of the truth in regard to our Lord's 
nature helps us to believe--enables us to go on, and on, and on; So that you see 
that the same thing that the intellect does with Euclid, the whole mind, heart, 
intellect, imagination, conscience, and will does with regard to God when a man 
sees God and knows Him. The man says, "I know enough to make life a grand and 
blessed and strong thing to me, and I am going on." We will see. "I cannot 
convey to you," he may say, "my conviction; that will only come with the 
conviction itself; you must see, else you do not know; but life to me is 
enough." So would he say; but then, "What is the way to this?" you say. Ah! my 
friends, if you have been at it for twenty or thirty or forty years, surely you 
have learnt by this time what you have just to go on doing--that is hearkening 
to Christ and doing His will. Let me try you a bit.
What is your first thought in the morning? Is it "God is life"? or is it "How am 
I to order my day's work?" Is it "God is very rich and I am His child and He 
will see to me"? or is it "How on earth shall I get through this that lies 
before me?" Are you afraid? Are the cares of this world troublesome to you? 
Well, you have not got on much. But if you are not trying to suppress them, if 
you are not trying to get rid of them, I am afraid you have not got on at all; 
and if you had been thirty or forty years trying to serve Christ, it has been a 
kind of service that He does not care much about, and it is no wonder that you 
do not get on. You have been very careful reading your Bible and going to 
church, and this thing and that thing that you think belongs to religion; but 
have you been doing the thing Christ told you? If you do that, I do not care 
whatever else you do; you cannot be wrong then. The same holds with you as with 
the beginner who is troubled as to whether there is a God or not. But you that 
believe in a God do not trust Him; whereas, the other is not sure that there is 
a God; and you think it very horrible of him to doubt the existence of a God. 
And yet you, believing that there is a God, are afraid of the trouble, the 
poverty, the opinion of the world, and are ambitious to get on this way or that! 
Oh, had almost sooner say you do not believe in a God than say that you believe 
in God, and yet He is nothing to you. And when you feel inclined to say heavy 
and hard things about your atheistic neighbour, think that there may be a beam 
in your own eye even worse--if we can bear to call it so--than the mote in his. 
Indeed, friends, it is because our life does not shine that men have stood up 
and said "There is no light." You see a man greedy and grasping--as much taken 
up with the things of this world as if he were to live--I will not say to the 
age of Methusaleh-- but to the age of seventyfive or eighty. He works in the 
world as if he were to live for ever in it; and sometimes, I think, the 
punishment that would fit him best would be to be condemned to live for ever in 
the world. What a thing that would be! Ah!, the man who is most sure that there 
is no God and that he can get on pretty well--he won't say first rate--but 
pretty well without Him; I think the better way would be just to let him live on 
and on and on, until he got heartily sick of himself and hated himself, and 
would gladly yield anything to get out of himself. Ah, friends, there is a worse 
thing than dying never to wake again. There is a worse thing than dying for 
ever, and going soul and brain to the dust, and that is to wake up and find that 
there is no God. That is the horror of horrors to me. But to tell me that I am 
to live for ever, and that there is no God! For anything any man knows who does 
not believe in a God it may be so. He cannot tell with certainty that he is 
going to die forever because he sees no more of those that have gone before. Why 
should not they go on to some other sphere as they came into this one? Without 
any warning or any choice, they do not know until they find themselves here. Why 
should it not be so in another state of existence? But to find yourselves there 
without a God! There is no use praying to be killed, because there is no |God to 
hear your prayer. You can no more annihilate yourselves than make yourselves; 
the whole thing would be utter misery, especially when the man has such ideas 
that he is satisfied with himself. But what is to be done with you and me, who 
cannot finish ourselves? Poor creatures! we feel that if God is like us, He had 
better cease and we had better all cease; but if we see He is like us--only He 
is perfect, absolute in grandeur and loveliness, ah then,"I shall get rid of 
this bad in me--this poor, mean stuff in me, and I shall become glorious, true, 
and excellent like Him." That is worth living for; nothing else is; it is for 
that that Christ tells us to put confidence in Him and obey His word, and we 
shall see the Father. "He that heareth and openeth the door, I will come in, sit 
down with him, and sup with him and he with Me." When God is seated at the very 
fireside of our hearts, then there is no more doubt. I say, friends, it is a 
good thing that you should have doubt until you see that nothing less than that 
will do, and until you come to desire that, and to turn your judgments, your 
thought, and feeling in that direction. Oh! friends; I know nothing else in the 
world worth knowing. I could go on talking to you all the day long about this, 
but I should weary you. Faith is the trying of the things unseen--the putting 
them to the test, and whatever your doubts or your fears are try Him by 
obedience, and then you will get help to carry you on. Less than that won't do. 
The darkness of life's closing time will come round about you, and find you very 
doubtful, very sad, looking, looking into the darkness and wondering "Shall I 
wake or shall I sleep?" But if you believe that that man died and rose again, 
the whole thing is full of the dawn of an eternal morning. Coming up beyond the 
hills of this life, and full of such hope as the highest imagination of the poet 
has not a glimmer as of yet.
Do you hope for anything, friends? Thank God, that comes from you faith. No man 
that has not faith can hope. But do not think the world is going all to the 
devil. There is a better and stronger faith coming. It was a great thing that 
this foolish, actionless kind of religion should vanish, and that a simple, 
obedient, hoping, trusting life should takes its place. The world is not worse 
than it was. Many even of those that do not believe in God have faith towards 
their neighbour. Even those who do not believe, on the whole are better in this 
century than those that did not believe in the last. Only, we are a set of 
foolish men and women who simply talk and nothing else--neither believe nor 
disbelieve--who have neither the soul nor the heart to be in earnest about 
anything. God has a hold upon them too, and He has but to place His hand upon 
them to make them feel it.
But, friends, what we have to do is let our light shine. Do you get any light? 
Let it shine. I do not mean be an example to other people. You have no business 
to set yourselves up for an example; you have to be and to do, and that is 
letting the light shine. It ought not to be possible to mistake a Christian for 
a man of the world. His very dealings with every man that comes near him have 
something to show, something that Christ would have done that a man of the world 
would not do. Tell me how you would like Christ to come in upon you at any 
moment in the midst of your business talk. Would you be ready to turn to H m and 
say, "Master, this is how I am saying the thing to my friend; this is how I see 
it in the light of Thy love!"? Would you be ready for that, or do you think that 
a great part of your being and your life can be conducted upon other laws than 
Christian? If a man does that, he is altogether wrong-- altogether wrong. Christ 
is God, the all-in-all, or nothing at all. If we were as the bush--if every 
Christian were as the bush that burned with fire--that would be the shining our 
light before men. Atheism would soon vanish; unbelief would draw in its horns; 
reproved, judged, condemned by the very presence of faith.
I would have you, then, friends, remember that faith is the trying of the thing 
that you do not see, and that you cannot be sure about,a thing that you do not 
see and which, not seeing, you have doubt about, you can yet try--that is faith; 
and if you are honest, that will be a great opportunity and a great help to you; 
it will start a fresh faith which you have not thought of before, and give your 
life a new start. Faith is intended to put to the test the unseen world of 
truth, love, law, hope, redemption. God grant us all faith enough to carry on 
from point to point till the faith shall vanish into light, and we have never to 
think about faith more, nor to think about Church more, nor the Bible more, nor 
prayer more, but our whole being shall be a delighted consciousness of the 
presence of God and His Christ.




Originally published in The Christian World Pulpit, London: James Clarke and 
Co., 21st June 1882.


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