"And Peter answered him and said, Lord, if it be thou, bid me come unto thee on the water"
(Matt. 14:28).
None of us knows what his weaknesses and his powers are, nor how exactly life will test them; but it is quite certain that we shall never know what they are, nor will life's tests teach us anything, unless we aspire to the highest that we know, and are continually testing ourselves by the most lofty professions. To shut out ultimate success through fear of interim failures, to maintain a worthless consistency by the miserable expedient of walking always along the mud flats, to fail in nothing because you had promised nothing, that is a folly which is only explicable on the ground that it springs from a narrow and calculating egotism. Far better always is the generous impulse, which, like Peter, says, "I will, I am able," and then goes out to learn through defeat a deeper knowledge of self and a deeper knowledge of Christ. And how can anyone know with fully proved conviction that Christ is the Way, the Truth and the Life, before he has gone through the whole of life in His company and faced all its worst challenges with Him? Christian discipleship always must begin in ignorance; or to put it in another way, it must always begin in a sort of plunge, a grand experiment. Something draws us to Him and we risk our lives upon Him. There is only one way to prove Him trustworthy and that is to trust Him. We do not ask of anyone to do more than make honest experiment of Jesus. Our faith in preaching Him is that, if Jesus is fairly given His chance, He will be able to make triumphant use of it.
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Herbert Henry Farmer was born in Highbury, London, the youngest of four sons. Herbert's early academic proclivities at Owen's School in Islington earned him a scholarship to Peterhouse, Cambridge, where he read for the moral sciences tripos and graduated first class in 1914. Farmer chose to work at a farm at Histon, near Cambridge, rather than entering the armed services during the First World War. In 1916 he decided to pursue ministry with the Presbyterian Church of England and was chosen as the Burney Student in the Philosophy of Religion at Westminster College, Cambridge. Following the completion of his studies in 1919, he took a pastorate at Stafford and three years later moved to a parish in New Barnet where he remained until 1931.
In 1931 Farmer left parish ministry to pursue an academic career. After a four-year post with the Hartford Seminary Foundation in Connecticut, he returned to Westminster College, Cambridge, where he succeeded his friend John Oman as Professor of Systematic Theology and Apologetics. In 1936 Farmer was awarded an honorary Doctorate of Divinity from the University of Glasgow, followed in 1937 by his appointment as the Stanton Lecturer in Philosophy of Religion at Cambridge.
Farmer retired from the college in 1960 and continued to preach and write into his twilight years. He died on 13 January 1981 in Birkenhead.