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‘Faith, in the sense in which I am here using the word, is the art of holding onto things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods. For moods will change, whatever view your reason takes. I know that by experience. Now that I am a Christian I do have moods in which the whole thing looks very improbable: but when I was an atheist I had moods in which Christianity looked terribly probable. This rebellion of moods against your real self is going to come anyway. That is why faith is such a necessary virtue: unless you teach your moods where they get off, you can never be a sound Christian or even a sound atheist, but just a creature dithering to and fro, with its beliefs dependent on the weather and the state of its digestion. Consequently one must train the habit of faith.

The first step is to recognise the fact that your moods change. The next step is to make sure that, if you have once accepted Christianity, then some of its main doctrines shall be deliberately held before your mind for some time every day. That is why daily prayers, religious readings and gathering together are such a necessary part of the Christian life. We have to be continually reminded of what we believe. Neither this belief nor any other will automatically remain alive in the mind. It must be fed. As a matter of fact if you examined a hundred people who had lost their faith in Christianity, I wonder how many of them would turn out to have been reasoned out of it by honest argument? Do not most people simply drift away?’