Alma ties in this first test of the process by returning to the concept of the continuum of faith and its relationship to knowledge. While he has indicated that faith is not knowledge, clearly there is a great relationship between them. Faith has allowed for the planting of the seed, but once that seed’s goodness is measured by its growth, now the person knows that the seed was good because of the evidence.
Once we have evidence, we do not need faith on which to base our actions, because we have knowledge. It is just as with the child riding the bicycle, it begins with faith, but converts to knowledge after experience. Alma is teaching that very principle, that faith moves in a similar arena to knowledge in that they are both motivators to action, but that faith operates in a specialized niche, one where we lack the types of evidence or substance upon which we typically base our knowledge, and our ability to act on our knowledge.
What Alma is also telling us is that people may learn to have a knowledge, a testimony, of certain parts of the gospel, but never return to the fertile soil to plant more faith. Thus the witnesses to the Book of Mormon were firm in their testimony of that one thing, but faltered in their belief of others. For that one thing they had knowledge, but never moved their faith that far in other aspects of the gospel.
Cross Reference: In Joseph Smith’s case, the swelling of the seed and rather dramatic understanding become knowledge were rather dramatic:
Joseph Smith-History:16-17
16 But, exerting all my powers to call upon God to deliver me out of the power of this enemy which had seized upon me, and at the very moment when I was ready to sink into despair and abandon myself to destruction—not to an imaginary ruin, but to the power of some actual being from the unseen world, who had such marvelous power as I had never before felt in any being—just at this moment of great alarm, I saw a pillar of light exactly over my head, above the brightness of the sun, which descended gradually until it fell upon me.
17 It no sooner appeared than I found myself delivered from the enemy which held me bound. When the light rested upon me I saw two Personages, whose brightness and glory defy all description, standing above me in the air. One of them spake unto me, calling me by name and said, pointing to the other—This is My Beloved Son. Hear Him!
Joseph’s incipient faith grew rapidly, and grew to the point where Alma describes his knowledge as “perfect in that thing.” Indeed, Joseph’s understanding was so firm that he was unable to deny it afterward (Joseph Smith-History 24).