with each other. We live in the midst of a perpetual conflict between our
yesterdays and our to-days. There is no simple, obvious sequence in the
message of experience. The days will not dovetail into each other. Life is
compact of much that is impossible of true adjustment at the hands of any
time-born philosophy. And in all this seeming confusion there lies the
necessity for faith. Herein it wins its victory. We are to trust God not
because we cannot trace Him, but that by trusting Him we may ever be more
able to trace Him and to see that He has a way through all these winding
and crossing paths. Faith does more than hold a man's hand in the darkness;
it leads him into the light. It is the secret of coherence and harmony. It
does not make experience merely bearable, it makes it luminous and
instructive. It takes the separate or the tangled strands of human
experience and weaves them into one strong cable of help and hope.

_Trust in Him at all times._ Then faith at its best is a habit. Indeed,
religion at its best is a habit, too! We are sometimes too ready to
discount the worth of the habitual in our religious life. We put a premium
on self-consciousness. We reduce the life of faith to a series of acts of
faith of varying difficulty and import, but each detached from the rest and
individually apprehended of the soul. Surely this is all wrong. In our
physical life we are least conscious of those functions that are most vital
and continuous, and the more perfectly they do their work the less we think
about them. The analogy is incomplete and must be drawn with care. But when
you have conceded that faith has to be acquired, that it has to be learned,
there is still this much in the analogy. If faith is a long and hard
lesson, the value of the lesson to us is not the effort with which we learn
it, but the ease with which we apply it. The measure of conscious effort in
our faith is the measure of our faith's weakness. When faith has become a
spontaneity of our character, when it turns to God instinctively, when it
does its work with the involuntariness of habit, then it has become strong.