Scriptural faith shows us another generalisation serving to the easier practice of faith—the treasuring of thoughts of faith in memorial observances and names; but the thoughts are historical, not philosophical. The Sabbath, the rite of circumcision, the sacred feasts commemorative of Israel's earliest history, and those added in memorial of subsequent events such as the feast of Purim, all became to instructed faith representative facts-facts which brought with them into the mind, affecting the thinking heart, each its own history of Jehovah's love and glory, and of manifestations of His right to Israel's service and faith. The holy names, as has been already noticed (Chap. III.), were, from the time of Abraham, in faith's use concentrations of history. While some, as "Jehovah-jireh," localised materials of faith over the land-lamps of faith drawing the eye to the history of God's love of His chosen people —the great divine names progressively declared were to older Israel helping points of rest for the thoughts of faith; and the last revealed name, "Jehovah," grew during their generations to be the word of faith for all their long history of national mercies, and all the manifestations of His holiness which His saving love had made to them in ever-mingling forms of goodness and severity. To the contemporaries of our Lord the name "Jesus" grew by degrees to be the representative of a mass of facts of grace-a history of well-known manifestations of saving love, inspiring faith in Him for greater things. Believers in the Word of God now inherit all the treasures of faith-giving facts, which the thoughts of the patriarchs grouped around the first names of God-El, El-elohim, Most High God, Lord of heaven and earth, &c.; all that the Jew reading in the Book of the Law and in the Prophets associated with the word Jehovah; all that the men of the fulness of times thought of in Jesus; all that the apostolic age came in progress to be reminded of by the name of the Comforter, the Holy Ghost. Yet when we think on God and the Saviour and the sanctifying Spirit, it is the facts and promises and assurances spreading themselves over man's life, from Adam until the end of the world, that we think of; and we feed thereon our well-grounded faith in the glad tidings, matured in the fulness of times, that

Standard

that of a

"God so loved the world as to give His only-begotten Son, that whosoever believeth on Him should not perish but have everlasting life." It is by thinking of these human realities— these facts of human religion recorded by divine commandthat the writer to the Hebrews (Heb. xii. 1) bids us guide the life of faith now, and get power to "lay aside all superfluous weight, and sin that so easily besets us, and run with patience the race set before us." The "cloud of witnesses," the great examples of faith enumerated in the eleventh chapter, are to be present to the believer's mind "surrounding him "-that is, are to be habitually in his thoughts, and he is to be helped by such thought of them. Helped to do what?-To exercise the like faith to exert himself looking to the same support. "Looking unto Jesus," with which the writer completes his direction of our faith, is evidently to be a similar habitual thinking of His religious history, the facts of His faith, how He for the "unseen," " hoped-for," heart-believed, definite prospect of "joy set before Him," "endured the cross, despising the shame." The roll of names in Hebrews, chapter xi., is practically an index, slightly annotated, to the whole history of human faith. And to those familiar with the successive passages of that history, from Abel to the tried Jewish believers of latest times, and able from much thinking to call up before the mind the facts written for our learning, each name is to be the callword, bringing to liveliness the recollection or impression of a whole class of facts of God's ways to individual men, and their faith because of them; something as the successive divine names, El, Elohim, Jehovah, God and Father of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, became to patriarch, Jew, and Christian representative words, each of masses of facts greater or less according to the thinker's knowledge or his capacity for entertaining a multitude of thoughts and their relative comforts.

5. Besides their descriptions of faith concentrating in an emoof faith- tional thinking on the facts and ways of God's love, a belief little child. of the heart in things hoped for, seeing them though they be invisible, the Scriptures, in many indirect forms, and also in direct language, give us as the human type of the manner of our right feeling towards God, the manner of a little child; that

which was chosen to furnish a word for the name of the first recorded "faith" (Gen. xv. 6). To understand, then, how we are to think of the things of God, we may logically conclude that we should observe how a little child thinks upon the matters of his faith. The faith of little children, being the least distracted by multiplicity of thoughts among all the believings of human relationship, should be an instructive as well as relevant example of what we may practically understand by a human soul having entire belief, conviction, of things hoped for, perfect persuasion of things unseen, and of how it is the heart that such faith hangs by. It is from no persuasion of the intellect, no careful cautious proof of its being safe to confide, that a young child trusts, believes in, has ever before him, the tender, abundant, stable love of his father or his mother, so that he realises, as if he had them already in his hand, the unseen desirable things they have told him of; and he has nothing of indistinctness or indefiniteness in his forelooking to their promises. In the later bonds of friendship, and the ties which begin therewith, we are not surprised at less or more of calculating thought, the deposit of that experience of evil which the human heart cannot avoid wholly, nor perhaps ever escapes some injury from; but such a veil of caution upon the heart of a child would be to every observer as unnatural, and in need of explanation, as the absence of gaiety or of growth. Perhaps it is not going beyond the intention of the Scriptural analogy of faith, if we even think of a man's faith in the unseen things of God as designed to be like the faith which a little child has in such of these same things as he can understand. The idea of another life than this is apprehended by young children. They form notions of God, a yet invisible Being of perfect power and goodness, and of heaven as His dwelling-place and their future home. What is their manner of thinking of these unseen subjects of thought? When they hear of the death of a playmate, or when in mortal illness they are made to comprehend that they are soon to die, and leave their parents and companions, they talk of God, and Jesus, and heaven, and their already departed friends, in the very manner in which

L

Faith of the "cloud

grown persons talk of definitely expected persons, places, or
possessions, of their worldly prospects. This is, as authoritative
examples show, the very kind, and should be the degree, of
faith's confidence of things hoped for, and persuasion of things
not seen.
If it be said that a child's faith is not the faith
required of us, which must be a reasoning faith, and not a mere
reflection of what we are told, is not the just and instructive
answer to this, that the faith of grown persons has, when it is
acquired in mature life, to be a reasoning faith, partly because
they have to reason back over ground which they have lost;
having to bring themselves to feel the reality and the import-
ance of the things told them in God's word, by a laborious
expulsion of the false impressions, and a difficult victory over
the erroneous inclinations, which worldly life, acting upon a
fallen nature, has produced within them, antagonistic to the
things of God? They have to be "converted, and become as
little children." The proper condition of faith, its only healthy
state, the attainment therefore which it has to make, is that
of being impressed and affected by the things of God as soon
as we comprehend them, believing at once, like a child, without
any "slowness of heart."

6. Just such an unhindered realising of the unseen things of wit- of God is that exemplified by the "cloud of witnesses." They nesses." are shown to us contemplating the different subjects of their faith as matter-of-course realities, they having been promised by God. Their thoughts are not speculative, but definitely expectant. They look for promised events and individuals just as children count upon the promises of their parents, however unconnected they may be with any appearances of their present world of procuring causes. Thus Noah looked forward for a hundred and twenty years to a flood destroying all life on the earth. Abraham left all, to be a pilgrim looking to the five hundred years distant inheritance; through the seed, first improbable (Gen. xviii.), next impossible (chap. xxii.) So Isaac contemplated the distinct earthly futures of his two sons; Jacob the political fortunes of the yet unborn tribes his sons were to found; and Joseph looked on through four centuries to the Exodus, and the interment of his bones in the promised

land. With such simplicity of faith did Moses and Joshua
and the Judges expect-what their eyes never were to see—
particular events of the deliverance and subsequent progress
of Israel towards the possession of Canaan.
The martyrs
refused deliverance from their terrible sufferings, at the price
of apostasy, looking with undoubting expectation to their
rising from the dead to a better life.

in a per

sonal con

7. A feature of entirely childlike faith, showing the most Child-faith concentrated form of realising, presents itself in some of the recorded cases; that of contemplating not only the actual, dis- nection. tinct existence of the believed-in things, but the believer's own personal connection with them—a connection, persuasion, feeling, or whatever it may be named, of personal union of some one kind or another with a personally conceived God-a God of distinct historical position and affections. What more impresses itself on the imagination in realising Noah's feelings, as the hundred years passed on fruitless of any result to his warnings, than that his soul must have had a growing sense of becoming alone with God on the earth-passing from connection of being or life with all of mankind into union with God alone, his hiding-place in the coming storm, the Lord and the salvation of his obedient soul? Moses' isolation in the centre of the Egyptian court, in the solitudes of Horeb, and in the camp of the murmuring people, is similarly a dark background on which stands out his true life of conscious supporting union with Jehovah, whose servant, spoken with face to face, he was. Perhaps that union of faith is most instructively recognisable in Abraham's going forth from his country and from his father's house to his announced life of a stranger with God in the worldlooking through five hundred years to the nearest rest promised for his seed in the land to which he went; and rest in God alone for him and his descendants until then. Yet more impressive is the conscious separation from all human life and all earthly good, and union to God alone in possible life afterwards, that we must read in his going forth to the terrible three days' journey, to leave his only child, his unsuspecting son, the heir of the promises, dead on the lonely mountain even at God's command. The sense of such union of affection and support