galaxy, in thy brain the geometry of the city of God, in thy heart the power of love and the realms of right and wrong!"

Moreover the doctrine of man's paltriness and insignificance seems to me no less pernicious than erroneous. If we be so paltry, we say to ourselves, "Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die." Why should such contemptible atoms go through the torture of battling with temptation or of conquering self? But when we remember that our spiritual nature is akin to God's, made only a little lower than His-made, perhaps, as nearly like to His own as it was possible for God Himself to make it-then we are stimulated to walk worthy of the manhood with which we have been endowed. We are inspired to agonise (if need be) until we become perfect, even as He is perfect.

131

Faith.

"The Lord is my strength and my shield; my heart trusted in Him, and I am helped therefore my heart greatly rejoiceth; and with my song will I praise Him."-PSALM XXviii. 7.

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“THE

"THE conditions necessary to constitute a religion," it has been well said, “are these there must be a creed or conviction, claiming authority over the whole of human life; a belief or set of beliefs, deliberately adopted, respecting human destiny and duty, to which the believer inwardly acknowledges that all his actions must be subordinated; and, moreover, there must be a sentiment connected with this creed, or capable of being evoked by it, sufficiently powerful to give it in fact the authority over human conduct to which it lays claim." Now this creed or conviction, this belief or set of beliefs, this attendant sentiment, and this correspondence of conduct with the dictates of the creed, are all summed up in the word faith.

The Old Testament doctrine of faith in God, and the New Testament doctrine, are both doctrines of trust in a Person. Faith is not mere belief. It is something quite different from the tacit assent which a man may give to a proposition, because he does not care to take the trouble of denying it. Faith or trust is an affection of the heart, not a faculty of the head. "Christian faith," says Dr Bushnell," is the faith of a transaction; it is not the committing of one's thought in assent to a proposition, but it is the trusting of one's being to a Being, there to be rested, kept, guided, moulded, governed and possessed for ever."

St James, you remember, says, "Thou believest that there is a God. Thou doest well; but The devils are as

the devils also believe."

religious as you are, if your belief in the existence of God constitutes the whole of your religion. Suppose a man believes in ThirtyNine Articles (or, for the matter of that, in 399), if his religion ends there, what is he the better for it? He might just as well be without it. Suppose a man believes in the righteousness and binding force of the Ten Commandments, and breaks them all, his belief, so far from making him a better man, is the strongest proof of his

degradation. "What doth it profit, my brethren," says St James," though a man say he hath faith, and have not works, can faith save him? Faith without works is dead." Luther did not like the Epistle of James. He called it an epistle of straw, and would have liked to expunge it from the Bible. But the doctrine of St James is most certainly the doctrine of Christ. "Not every

one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven, but he that doeth the will of my Father." The doctrine of St James is also that of St Paul. The faith which St James says cannot save is the faith of mere belief. The faith which St Paul says can save is the faith of trust; the faith that worketh by love; the faith that makes a man one with Christ in nature, in sympathy, in aim. As the author of Ecce Homo' says, "Christ required personal devotion from His followers so vehemently, that they often, in describing their relation to Him, overleap the bounds of ordinary figurative language. They speak of hating father and mother for the sake of Christthat is, their love for their earthly relations seemed but as hatred when compared with their passionate love for Him. St Paul speaks of Christ being his life, his very self. It is this intense per

sonal devotion, this habitual feeding on the character of Christ, so that the essential nature of the Master seems to pass into and become the essential nature of the servant, that is expressed in the words, Eating the flesh and drinking the blood of the Son of Man.

Our text, in addition to supplying us with a definition of faith, points out its reasonableness. If it were not reasonable for me to trust in God, I ought not to be expected to trust in Him. Some persons seem to think, as Hooker quaintly puts it," that the way to be ripe in faith is to be raw in wit and judgment." But faith, pro

perly so called, can only be based on reason. It is reasonable for a human being to trust in God, because he needs the strengthening and protection which this trust alone can secure.

Man is morally weak. When we look at him in his conflict with evil, we are forcibly reminded of the remark of Pliny, that there is nothing in the world at once so sublime and so paltry as man. He is sublime enough to know the right; but he is paltry because he does the wrong. It is unnecessary to attempt to prove this. Every one who is not totally destitute of a conscience must sometimes have said with the poet