‘We take refuge in what He believed when we are not sure about what we can. We trust His faith in men when experience shakes our own. We rest on His knowledge of the world, on His belief in divine power and human possibility, on His confidence in what He and His work did for men. We trust His experinece and His judgment more than our own. When we cannot trust our wishes, hopes, or forecasts of human destiny, we can rest on His faith in it who secured it. If all the facts were against us, he is the fact that outwieghs them all. And we both recover and complete our faith by being compelled to trust His. It is the same principle that sustains our faith in prayer whatever the answer be, whether there be any answer in the experienced sense or not. It does faith more harm than good to dwell much on what are called answers to prayer. It not only ties faith too closely to experience, but it deepens the doubt that arises where answer cannot be traced. We need only to be sure that prayer is received, that it goes home, and is dealt with. Our tears are in His bottle. He has old prayers of ours by Him maturing still. That is what is of faith in respect of prayer. Not that it must be sensibly granted – that were sight, and not faith. Prayer least of all lives upon such results, such experience. If we saw all, experienced all, possessed all, where would room be left for the excercise of faith? Faith is there to protect us both from the verdict of experience and from the absence of it. It saves us both from our knowledge of the world and our want of that knowledge. It makes a man

That awful independent of to-morrow
Whose yesterdays look backward with a smile.

It even gives us little of Christ’s experience, – these meagre gospels carry us but a little way there, – but it gives us Jesus Christ Himself, “the same yesterday, and to-day, and for ever.”‘ (P. T. Forsyth, ‘Faith and Experience’, Wesleyan Methodist Magazine 123 (1900): 417)