“If ye have faith… ye shall say unto this mountain, Be thou removed”

The expression “If ye have faith… ye shall say unto this mountain, Be thou removed” is a biblical promise of extraordinary power through belief and prayer. In Philip Carey’s childhood it becomes more than a scriptural image: he tests its literal force against his own unhealed clubfoot, and the explanation he receives makes the promise a source of both hope and self-doubt. Its significance lies in the gap between the certainty of the words and the painful uncertainty of whether faith can make them true.

The promise encountered

During a wave of religious enthusiasm at school, Philip joins the Bible League. He sends London his name, age, and school, signs a pledge to read a prescribed portion of scripture each night for a year, and pays half a crown. In return he receives a daily reading calendar and a framed prayer to say before opening the Bible. His nightly reading is earnest and uncritical; he accepts the printed text even when its stories describe cruelty or deceit, because those actions appear within a religious narrative.

One evening the alternating readings bring him to Jesus’ promise that faith without doubt can move a mountain into the sea, followed by the assurance that whatever believers ask for in prayer will be given. The words initially make little impression. Two or three days later, however, the Canon in residence chooses the same passage for a sermon. The boys of King’s School sit in the cathedral choir, far from the pulpit, and the preacher’s position makes it difficult for them to hear. Yet the recently encountered text reaches Philip clearly enough to seem personally addressed to him. He turns it over during the sermon, finds it again in the Gospel that night, and keeps his question to himself until the Christmas holidays.

Testing its literal meaning

At home after supper, with Mrs. Carey counting and dating eggs, Philip pretends to browse the Bible and asks his uncle whether the passage really means what it says. Mr. Carey is airing the damp Blackstable Times before the fire. Mrs. Carey answers that whatever the Bible says is true; Mr. Carey makes the promise conditional on faith, saying that a mountain could be moved by the grace of God if a person truly believed. Philip presses the point: could belief itself make the event happen? His aunt ends the exchange by telling him to say good night and teasing that he does not intend to move a mountain that evening.

The question returns weeks later, now sharpened from an abstract puzzle into a personal one. Philip asks what it would mean if someone prayed for something, believed it would happen, and still did not receive it. Mr. Carey’s answer is absolute: the failure would show that the person had not possessed enough faith. The doctrine offers no independent test of the promise; an unanswered prayer is taken as evidence against the supplicant’s belief rather than against the promised result.

Prayer for a cure

Philip applies this reasoning to his clubfoot. If God has not cured him, he concludes, then he must not truly have believed, although he cannot see how his faith could have been stronger. He also wonders whether he gave God enough time: his first period of prayer had lasted only nineteen days. He begins again, this time fixing Easter as the date by which the cure might come, and continues to ask that his foot be made whole.

His efforts extend beyond formal prayer. When he sees a new moon or a dappled horse, he makes a wish; he watches for shooting stars; and during exeat, while the family eats chicken at the vicarage, he breaks the lucky bone with Aunt Louisa and wishes again. He repeats his request in identical words whenever it occurs to him, as if keeping the wording constant might matter. The narrative presents these customs as older forms of wishing alongside his Christian appeal: Philip recruits every hopeful sign he knows into the same desire for bodily change.

Hope gradually gives way to anticipated failure. Philip begins to doubt that his faith will be sufficient this time either and turns his particular disappointment into a general conclusion: perhaps nobody ever has enough faith. The mountain-moving promise, first heard as a scriptural assertion, has thus become a measure by which he judges himself. It offers an explanation for why his prayer has not healed him, but that explanation places the burden on the child whose body remains unchanged.

Religious certainty and later skepticism

Philip’s encounter with the promise belongs to a childhood shaped by church observance and the conviction that the printed Bible speaks with authority. His uncle’s confident answer briefly supplies the rule by which he interprets the passage: divine power is available, but only to belief strong enough to claim it. The episode shows the emotional cost of making an extraordinary scriptural assurance depend on a child’s ability to eliminate doubt. Philip’s question is not merely whether mountains move; it is whether his own failure to be healed exposes a fault in his faith.

Later, in Germany, Philip’s understanding of religious truth is unsettled by contact with people whose sincere convictions belong to different traditions. Attending Lutheran worship and then Mass with Hayward, he sees that Roman Catholic worshippers appear earnest rather than hypocritical, and begins to recognize that people raised in other religious communities might be as certain of their beliefs as he is of his own. His conversations with Weeks deepen the difficulty of treating conviction as proof: believers in different faiths all regard themselves as right. Philip eventually realizes that he no longer believes in God, describing his childhood faith as something he has put aside like a cloak he no longer needs.

The mountain promise therefore marks an early stage in a longer movement from received certainty toward personal doubt. In the childhood episode, an unanswered prayer is explained by insufficient faith; in the later crisis, Philip questions the grounds on which any religious claim can be treated as true. The expression retains its force because it joins a vast miracle to an intimate bodily hope—and because the story lets the child discover that believing the promise does not guarantee that the promised change will come.