Faith must be carefully distinguished from mere intellectual belief or opinion. When a person has a good opinion about someone, he is said to have a certain kind of faith in him. But this kind of opinion does not have that spiritual potency which belongs to a living faith in a Perfect Master. The beliefs and opinions of a person often constitute a very superficial layer of the human psyche. They do not have any integral relationship with the deeper forces of the psyche. They remain in one region of the mind without bringing about any radical changes in the core of personality, which determines the attitude toward life. People hold such beliefs just as they wear clothes, and in times of emergency they tend to change their clothes to suit their immediate purposes. In such cases, beliefs are unconsciously determined by other purposes; the purposes are not consciously determined by beliefs.
-Discourses 7th Ed. p368