The moment makes him, and passing away unmakes him.  But the true man of the moment is the man to whom the moment is but one throb in the pulse of eternity.  For him the moment does not stand out in splendid isolation.  It is set in its place between that which hath been and that which shall be.  And its true significance is not something abiding in it, but something running through it.  So is it in this great matter of faith.  Only the faith that can trust at all times can trust at any time.  The moment that faith heeds the dictation of circumstance it ceases to be faith and becomes calculation.  All faith is transcendent.  It is independent of the conditions in which it has to live.  It is not snared in the strange web of the tentative and the experimental.  He that has for one moment felt the power of faith has got beyond the dominion of time.

Trust in Him at all times. That is the only real escape from confusion and contradiction in the judgements we are compelled to pass upon life.  Times change so suddenly and inexplicably.  The hours seem to be at strife 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.