Eli Stanley Jones

Some have said that the power of a Redeemer would depend upon two things: first, upon the richness of the self that was given; and second, upon the depths of the giving. Friend and foe alike are agreed on the question of the character of Jesus Christ. . . . Whatever our creed, we stand with admiration before the sublime character of Jesus. Character is supreme in life, and hence Jesus stood supreme in the supreme thing - so supreme that, when we think of the ideal, we do not add virtue to virtue, but think of Jesus Christ, so that the standard of human life is no longer a code, but a character.

In our Ashrams of East and West, places of spiritual retreat, we begin with what we call "The Morning of the Open Heart," in which we tell our needs. . . . We give four or five hours to this catharsis. The reaction of one member, who listened to it for the first time, was: "Good gracious, have we all the disrupted people in the country here?" My reply was: "No, you have a cross section of the church life honestly revealed." In the ordinary church, it is suppressed by respectability, by a desire to a appear better than we really are.

Very often when I haven't faith in my faith, I have to have faith in His faith. He makes me believe in myself and my possibilities, when I simply can't. I have to rise to His faith in me. A woman who was inwardly collapsed said to me, "Well, I have no faith of my own, but I do have faith in your faith." "Good," I replied, "take faith in my faith as a first step, and then you will go on to something infinitely better-faith in His faith." With faith in His faith you can do anything- anything that ought to be done. There is a passage which touches your need. "For the Eternal . . . will not let you go." Faith is not merely your holding on to God; it is God holding on to you. He will not let you go! As Walt Whitman puts it, "Not until the sun refuses to shine, do I refuse you." Then keep saying to your soul, "In quietness and in confidence shall be your faith." (Isaiah 30:15). Then repeat to your soul these words: "To say what ought to be cannot be is a brief and complete statement of atheism." It is. Say to yourself, "What ought to be can be, and I will make it so." And you will. And will go beyond yourself.

I see that I am inwardly fashioned for faith and not for fear. Fear is not my native land; faith is. I am so made that worry and anxiety are sand in the machinery of life; faith is oil. I live better by faith and confidence than by fear and doubt and anxiety. In anxiety and worry my being is gasping for breath - these are not my native air. But in faith and confidence I breath freely - these are my native air.

A Johns Hopkins doctor says that "we do not know why it is that the worriers die sooner than the non-worriers, but that is a fact." But I, who am simple of mind, think I know; we are inwardly constructed, in nerve and tissue and brain cell and soul, for faith and not for fear. God made us that way. Therefore, the need of faith is not something imposed on us dogmatically, but it is written in us intrinsically. We cannot live without it. To live by worry is to live against Reality.