thought of Jesus himself, His personal worthiness of love whom they are to be "like, seeing Him as He is" (1 John iii. 2). Both look and endeavour onwards to "an abundant entrance into the everlasting kingdom of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ" (2 Pet. i. 11).

14. The progress of an individual's faith to fuller and fuller Progress in thoughts of Christ and His salvation, implying different faiths perceptic at different times, all of which were right, but changing in order to perfection, is more clearly seen in Paul's religious history. Paul. Saul's religiousness did not begin on the road to Damascus. He was a man whose sincere regard to revealed truth before made his susceptible spirit nerve itself to a course of action for the sake of the truth as he saw it, in which the sense of duty alone could have sustained him, for it must have required him to suppress painfully the human sympathies with which his nature was very largely gifted. His perceptions of the truth were defective, not his practical emotional thinking of it, having it "ever before him," constraining his life. He only did not then see Jesus Christ as the end of the law. His conversion was not from a man without God in his thoughts; that is, without faith. It was from shortcoming sight and thought of the truth revealed under the law to so far complete sight of it, and to immediate acceptance of it by his spirit, already a believing one. So Ananias described his change as a progress of faith: "The God of our fathers hath chosen thee, that thou shouldest know His will, and see the just One, and shouldest hear the voice of His mouth. For thou shalt be His witness unto all men of what thou hast seen and heard" (Acts xxii. 14, 15).. Why Paul, to whose great intellect all Gentile Christians look up, should have been blind to what they see taught in all the Law and all the Prophets, is a question of only comparative difficulty, an illustration of the origin of the normal diversity of faith. Saul's blindness was shared by the Jews generally, whose nation is blind to this day, "not able to see to the end of the law" (2 Cor. iii. 13); and especially was it the blindness of Saul's religious sect, the Pharisees, who could not see in Jesus of Nazareth the expected Messiah, because they had come to habitual think

ing that they saw in the prophecies another manner of position and person in the Messiah than the mean human position Jesus assumed and the divine nature which He asserted; and unlearning is always more difficult in religious truth than learning. Saul's faith had also, after his vision at Damascus, still to make great progress in recognising the whole truth of the Messiah's salvation taught in the books so familiar to him, the Law and the Prophets. As he needed a special revelation to see Jesus as the Christ, he and all the apostles needed afterwards help of the same kind to see the truth, declared by Jesus to Nicodemus, that "God so loved the world that whosoever believeth in Jesus shall have everlasting life." At least six years beheld him preaching Christ from no more far-seeing point of view than the Jewish Christians were long confined to. During part of that period he appears as the companion of Barnabas, and always named second to him. Contemporaneous with his beginning to bear the name of Paul, though in no indicated connection therewith, his thoughts appear free to contemplate the will of God as being the salvation of all nations, and not of the Jews only. That freedom of faith marked another diversity among the very leaders of faith; for Paul's confident vision of the end of Jewish ceremony was not shared in by the others so soon. His case is peculiarly instructive in the present consideration. Had Paul written a creed at those three different periods of his life, they would have been three different creeds; but they would have illustrated a feature of what is here meant by diversity of faith. They would not have contradicted one another; only each later creed would have been fuller than that going before it. They would have been, as diverse human creeds, the spontaneous expressions of believers, are, and as the creeds of churches should be if they were full confessions of faith, records of a following on to know the Lord." In all his after-progress Paul never departed from the simplicity of teaching Christ and Him crucified, the hope and life of God's prodigal children arising to go to their father; but he was for ever learning spiritually, adding to his influential thoughts, ever correcting the old exclusive religious pride of the "young man Saul," and be

coming one in sympathies and self-abegnation with the body of Christ, Jew and Greek, barbarian, Scythian, bond and free.

It

advance

Hebrew

15. Paul's faith, like John's and like Peter's, had a line of Paul's thought of its own, in which, like theirs, it went on to know through the Lord, not changing views of salvation so much as enlarg- into Chrising them. John's love of Jesus himself gathered about it tian faith. personal things of Christ, one after another accumulating the fulness of Christ from "the Word" of "the beginning" to the Lamb by the throne. Peter's sight of the work of "the Christ, the Son of the living God," drew more into one line of vision terminating in Him, the pilgrimage of working, suffering, tempted life, and the inheritance incorruptible and undefiled and that fadeth not away, in which the object of his faith's vision was always Jesus who had gone to prepare it. Paul's recorded faith started from before the fulness of time. came forth richly furnished with the so full but yet unfinished revelation of the truth of God's love; and it was in connection with the forecasts of Jewish ordinances, and with the necessities which Jewish law compelled his soul to feel, that he learned the things of Christ to the fulness of that great feeling of them, which came to him after his eyes were memorably opened to see the end of the law. The law was to Paul a schoolmaster to bring him to Christ, in the full recognition of dependence, need, union, sympathy, spiritual connection, he was by it prepared for. The faith of the Jew was not thrown away by him. The veil on his Jewish-taught heart was rent, and Christ, the fulfilling of the Law, was beheld close to his sight. There was no conversion from Judaism to Christianity in the sense of converson from one religion (connection with God) to another. The faith of the Jew and the faith of the Christian were one, as spiritual and eternal life will be found to be one unbroken thing. The old revealed truth, pondered upon and become familiarly his own, fed the new thoughts. His faith converged with John's and Peter's to the same Object of Faith, at whose name every knee shall bow. But it was the same faith in which Abraham, far back in the history of faith, travelled along his solitary way, seeing afar off; and Moses and David, and the cloud of witnesses whom history

Q

Use of the means of

grace.

Historical

of creeds

-how

caused.

remembers travelling and looking Zionwards, widely apart from each other, on the many narrow paths of the world's life.

16. These three described examples illustrate the use of the means of grace to the diversified nature of fallen man. The "perfecting of the saints," the conforming of broken temperaments, the harmonising filling up of their diversities into likeness to Christ Jesus, is the work of the Gospel, of its study as of its ministry.

It would have been instructive in this matter if we could have had such records of the faith attained to by the female compeers of those disciples, and by persons in diverse social circumstances, as they saw or thought more and more of Jesus of Nazareth. The means of grace assimilate all original differences as life goes on; and the likening work is helped by the coming on of the state of old age, the sameness of whose few feelings upon all points is so great a contrast to the early antagonism or contrasts arising from sex, education, and position in life's relationships or occupations. But in the time of the freshness and strength and fulness of emotional capability, diversity arising from these present estates of the living soul is not all disease needing cure, but is partly a fulness of life, a richness in the heart's fruits of faith glorifying God, which seems the true service of earthly human life; and which, ripened and completed into harmony, may, much rather than may not, be thought of as giving a diversified beauty and joy to the everlasting inheritance of "the heir of all things," whose lifting up is to "draw all men to Him."

17. From these illustrations of diversity in the great exdivergence amples of faith, we may read with understanding what consequence is attached to the occasions of diversity adduced in the beginning of this chapter, and see thereby a more comfortable explanation than a charge of heresy is, of the historical differences of creed. In considering what things must be accepted as probable sources of diversity of faith and of creed next should a creed become a necessity-we find political, like social peculiarities, leaving their impress on the habits of religious thought, and that even in the case of the logical creeds which are the result of constrained thinking,

and often of conforming compromise. Of course, then, the propensities of thought which, even when forced into confining order, show such prominence of different features at different periods of the world as the creeds of Christendom do, must, in free, self-indulging, ruminating thought, be far more abundant in living individual peculiarities. The effect of race upon propensities of thought, appearing in the religious sentiment which, when compelled to logical expression, is apt to make differences of creed, is inexplicable, but quite recognised. Teutonic and Celtic Catholicism differ in the proportion in which religious sentiment dwells upon the Virgin Mary as one of its objects. Her altars, which are for the most part prominent objects in the churches of France and Belgium, are not so in those of Germany. Though interchange of religious reading has had no little influence in removing peculiarities of religious writing, and so far, consequently, of thinking, critics still think they have some definite meaning when they speak of a German, or a French, or an English, or even, diverse from English, a Scotch, way of looking at a religious subject. Who would expect the old Greek mind delighting in subtle disquisitions, and the Roman mind bent habitually upon practical organisation, to have set the multitude of revealed things of religion before a body of hearers, such as the Church, in the same shape of human system? Two churches, departing from and denouncing each other, were the early consequence of East and West coming together to discuss philosophical systems of religious truth. Dean Stanley traces the indomitable affectionate Benjamite in Saul of Tarsus as well as in Saul the king. He has pointed out the general characters of the descendants of Esau and Jacob, appearing throughout history divergent as those of their progenitors were. The Jew has been cautious, persevering, stooping to escape difficulties rather than rising to grapple with them; chastened and deterred only by centuries of discipline from time-serving adoption of idolatry. The Idumean has been impetuous, grand, generous, greedy, unstable-— Herod hearing John gladly, and then beheading him for a rash promise; Herod Agrippa, almost a Christian, but laughing at the idea of his being caught. The race was characterised by