Book: Let Us Have Faith

Overview

Helen Keller’s Let Us Have Faith (1940) is a reflective collection of essays that unites spiritual conviction with social conscience. Writing on the eve of world war and after the shocks of depression, Keller affirms faith as an active power that steadies individuals and societies, not a passive refuge from pain. Drawing on her life as a deafblind writer and advocate, she argues that the deepest forms of sight and hearing are inward discernments and that love, reason, and purposeful work make the invisible real. The book extends the religious ideas she had championed for years, especially a Swedenborgian sense of divine love and wisdom, while speaking directly to anxieties about tyranny, materialism, and doubt.

Context

Composed in a decade shadowed by authoritarianism and economic hardship, the essays answer a public crisis of confidence. Keller addresses readers who feel betrayed by violence and disillusioned by institutions, urging them to recover courage through a faith that binds thought to action. Her witness is at once personal and civic: the woman who learned to speak in darkness insists that moral clarity can outlast chaos, and that democracy depends on inner convictions expressed as service.

The Nature of Faith

Keller distinguishes between credulity and faith. Credulity, to her, clings to dogma or miracle; faith engages mind and conscience, testing experience against ideals. It is not a denial of suffering but a discipline that interprets suffering in the light of purpose. She presents faith as a living connection with the divine present in every person, apprehended through the soul’s inward senses. This presence does not cancel human freedom; it summons responsibility. Prayer, accordingly, is less petition than orientation, turning the will toward love and then doing the patient labor such turning requires.

Reason, Science, and the Inner Life

Keller refuses the stark choice between religion and reason. Science maps the outer world; faith reads its meaning. She welcomes scientific discovery as an ally that enlarges wonder and sharpens ethics, warning only that technique without tenderness becomes a tool of domination. Because she navigates the world beyond sight and sound, she treats interior perception as neither metaphor nor escape but as a reliable avenue to truth. The mind’s disciplined attention, she suggests, can learn to hear order in apparent chaos.

Democracy, Justice, and Service

The essays tie personal faith to public obligation. Keller defends democracy as a moral enterprise grounded in the worth of persons, vulnerable to decay when cynicism, greed, or fear hollow out its ideals. Love of neighbor becomes practical in education, in the dignity of labor, and in advocacy for those pushed to the margins, especially people with disabilities. She cautions that charitable sentiment without structural change is sentimentality, and that reform without compassion is cruelty by another name.

Suffering, Evil, and Hope

Evil, for Keller, is rooted in ignorance, separation, and misdirected desire. Its antidote is enlightened affection: the trained will to seek another’s good. Her own hardships are not paraded as triumph but offered as evidence that limits can awaken hidden resources. Hope is portrayed as morally strenuous: a habit of choosing the better possibility and sustaining it through community.

Style and Voice

The prose blends lyric warmth with ethical argument. Autobiographical scenes, early lessons, friendships, travels, are braided with scriptural and philosophical reflection. The tone is intimate without self-indulgence, exhortatory without stridency, aiming to kindle readers’ courage as much as their agreement.

Legacy

Let Us Have Faith endures as a compact testament to a humane, rational, and active spirituality. It proposes that the surest answer to an age of brutality is not withdrawal but disciplined love, faith that thinks, works, and keeps company with the most vulnerable until justice becomes habit.