gradually come to "know Whom we have believed." Without the initial
eagerness for God which opens the door and sends us out we remain
debarred from ever knowing. As the _Theologia Germanica_ puts it, "We
are speaking of a certain Truth which it is possible to know by
experience, but which ye must believe in before ye know."

The capacity for religious experience can be cultivated. Faith, like an
ear for music or taste in literature, is a developable instinct. It
grows by contagious contact with fellow believers; as "the sight of
lovers feedeth those in love," the man of faith is nourished by
fellowship with the believing Church. It is increased by familiarity
with fuller and richer experiences of God; continuous study of the Bible
leads men into its varied and profound communion with the Most High. It
is enlarged by private and social worship; prayer and hymn and message
were born in vital experiences, and they reproduce the experience.
Browning, in characteristic verse, describes the effect of the service
upon the worshippers in Zion Chapel Meeting:

These people have really felt, no doubt,
A something, the motion they style the Call of them;
And this is their method of bringing about,
By a mechanism of words and tones,
(So many texts in so many groans)
A sort of reviving and reproducing,
More or less perfectly (who can tell?),
The mood itself, which strengthens by using.

An unexpressed faith dies of suffocation, while utterance intensifies
experience and leads to fresh expression; religion, like Shelley's
Skylark, "singing still doth soar, and soaring ever singeth." Above all,