Faith and knowledge are team-mates. It is hardly fair to define one in terms of the
other. True, faith leads into knowledge and knowledge may beget a greater
faith, but these two are teamed together like electricity and magnetism,
shaping the great insights and understandings of the spirit. As magnetic fields
of force extend about and beyond the wire charged with electricity, so the
effective power about and beyond the stream of human knowledge.
Faith and knowledge are partners to each other. Faith
can build a greater knowledge and knowledge, rightly can be used to create a
more effective faith. Each has its risk to do. They so blend into one another that
it is often difficult to see where one leaves off and the other begins. Properly
used they sustain and support each other. (Wendell
O. Rich, Our Living Gospel [Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1964], 70-71)
Faith
is a foundation of testimony.
Faith is
another of the foundations of testimony.
Every
act of learning, investigation, invention, and discovery involves crossing the “abyss”
between the known and the unknown. The lamp of faith is the only lamp that
lights the way across this chasm. It is faith’s fore-gleam of truth that sends
the student to his test tube and crucible, impels the inventor to make his
persistent experiments, leads the scientist to formulate his new hypothesis,
and guides the explorer to the ends of the world.
All
intellectual progress is literally “from faith to faith.” Dr. Benjamin Moore,
an outstanding Bio-chemist, says, “it is imagination that leads science on from
investigation to investigation.” But it is faith in the correspondence of what
that “imagination” pictures to the mind that drives the scientist to his investigations.
For faith is literally the basic principle of all progress and learning.
Faith
is likewise the fundamental principle of all moral progress. Moral advancement
is made by approaching a higher standard of life. It is striving to teach a
worthy ideal. Awakened faith in the desirability of attaining the goal is the
driving force in this struggle. It is faith in honor that moves men to be
honest, it is faith in truth that leads men to be truthful, it is faith in
justice that makes men just, it is faith in purity that inspires men to strive
for holiness.
--Nephi Jensen
Liahona, the Elders Journal
Faith
brings to men and women of spiritual understanding, a relationship between
worthy effort in the physical and material world, and the enduring values of
the gospel and the realm of the spirit.
To the man who is successful in worldly achievement, faith
brings humility in lieu of arrogance, without robbing the able man, however, of
that glow of satisfaction which ever attends noble effort. In this philosophy
of the higher realm men of intelligence and skill conceive the part they play
in life as mission rather than careers, fulfilling their play in life as
missions rather than careers, fulfilling their assignments in a program infinitely
greater than they themselves can devise, utilizing materials and facilities and
forces over which, by grace, they have been given dominion, and subserving
purposes eternal and transcendently beautiful.
These men of intelligence and ability who are also men
of faith would tell you, if you asked them, that faith in spiritual realities
has never daunted their quest for knowledge and their ambition for all
legitimate achievement, and I think they will tell you, if you press them, that
the highest order of intelligence they have discovered in their experience is
that intelligence which perceives spiritual concepts and adequately correlates
these concepts with things of the finite world. I am very sure that they who
understood faith will not deprecate the mind which it blesses. So to the rich
or the poor, the high or lowly, the successful and those who fail, the
philosophy of faith brings stability, poise, composure, hope, and enduring
satisfaction. It is a vital and priceless acquisition. It is not always easy to
attain.
--President Stephen L. Richards
Conference Address
Where is Wisdom, pp. 172-73 (Ibid., 298-300)
