Faith in a Perfect Master becomes all-important because it nourishes and sustains faith in oneself and faith in life in the very teeth of setbacks and failures, handicaps and difficulties, limitations and failings. Life, as a person knows it in himself, or in most of his fellow beings, may be narrow, twisted, and perverse; but life as he sees it in the Master is unlimited, pure, and untainted.
In the Master, the aspirant sees his own ideal realized; the Master is what his own deeper self would rather be. He sees in the Master the reflection of the best in himself, which is yet to be but which he will surely one day attain. Faith in the Master therefore becomes the chief motive power for realizing the divinity that is latent in man.
True faith is grounded in the deeper experiences of the spirit and the unerring deliverances of purified intuition. An unwavering faith grounded in pure intuition can come only to a mind that is free from the pressure of diverse wants. True faith is therefore a matter of gradual growth. It grows in proportion to the success that the disciple attains in freeing his consciousness from diverse cravings.
-Discourses 7th Ed., pp 366-367