Faith
‘The heart’, said St John Henry Newman, ‘is commonly reached not through the reason, but through the imagination.’
It was a comment he made in a letter to The Times after Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel had said in 1841, at the opening of the Reading Room in Tamworth in the Midlands, that the spread of useful secular knowledge was the key to moral advancement.
Those availing themselves of the Reading Room would “in becoming wiser… become better.” Theology would not be needed in adult education: science and manufacturing would be enough.
This debate has gone on in our Western civilization in one form or another ever since. Our faith draws not on reason alone but on the experience of beauty in worship and music and religious art and buildings. Faith in God is, to quote Newman again, a matter of the ‘heart speaking to the heart’.
Of course, our reason, our ability to think things out is important, it is after all not irrational to believe in God. But ultimately our faith is alive when we are touched in our hearts.
Bernhard Schunemann (inspired by an article by Catherine Pepinster on the newly refurbished church of the Scared Heart in Droitwich Spa)
5 July 2026
