Saturday, March 18, 2023

Wendell O. Rich on Faith, Knowledge, and Testimony

  

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)