TWICE-BORN MEN
REMARKABLE CONVERSIONS OF WELL-KNOWN MEN
IN DIFFERENT AGES AND IN VARIED RANKS OF LIFE
Compiled by HY. PICKERING
A World Renowned Scientist
MICHAEL FARADAY, D.C.L., Scientist, Inventor, Philosopher, and Author. Some minds have a strong bent for experiment. They are of the type that will receive nothing without proof, but will be for ever’ probing into unknown things, and always asking “Why?” The world is in deep debt to such minds; it possesses many of its comforts and advantages because of their researches.
Scarcely an invention, a discovery, a marked advance in any of the fields of human knowledge has been made apart from the industrious investigation of such minds. Michael Faraday possessed such a mind. In his own field, that of experimental physics, his was perhaps the acutest and most original mind of our later times. Yet it is not generally known that he made a great discovery in a realm other than that of physics. He found there was one spacious field where experiment was useless, a region where the most capacious intellect must stoop to a very humbling thing—where, childlike, it must accept what it is told, apart from external proofs, or remain permanently ignorant of all the truth lying within that realm.
Faraday’s biographer was so astonished at the great scientist’s simplicity in the field of inquiry concerning man’s relations with his Maker, that he wondered whether he had erected a kind of partition in his brain, on one side of which he kept his scientific inquiries, and on the other his religious beliefs.
Faraday’s own explanation is worthy to be earnestly pondered. He says: “The ways are infinite in which man occupies his thoughts about the fears or hopes or expectation of a future life. I believe that the truth of that future cannot be brought to his knowledge by any exertion of his mental powers, however exalted they may be; that it is made known to him by other teaching than his own, and is received through simple belief of the testimony given .” What this testimony is may be known by the fact that Faraday rejoiced in that preaching which “boldly contended for the ancient faith that the bare death of Jesus Christ, without a deed or thought on the part of man, is sufficient to present the chief of sinners spotless before God.”
When he came to die he was asked what his speculations were as to the future, and he replied that he did not rest on speculations, but on certainties, and quoted that grand Scripture: “I know whom I have believed, and am persuaded that He is able to keep that which I have committed to Him against that day” (2 Ti 1:12).