finite, partly grasped with conscious firmness; and true to all human nature's experience of infirmity in the emotions of its faith, she began immediately to shrink from laying hold of the definite blessing, and to put it far off to the time of all the bereaved's blessedness. "I know that he shall rise again at the resurrection, at the last day." But her soul, though she knew it not, was ready to receive all; and He that was mighty to save strengthened her with the reproach of love wherewith God and man, God's child, alike strengthen failing faith. Said I not unto thee, that if thou wouldst believe thou shouldst see the glory of God?" "I am the resurrection and the life: he that believeth in me, though he be dead, shall live; and he that liveth and believeth in me shall never die. Believest thou this? And she said, Yea, Lord, I believe that thou art the Christ, the Son of God, which should come into the world."

Christian

10. The verification of the conclusions come to in Chapters Completed II., V., and VI., by comparison with recorded examples, which faith. has now been hastily gone over in the histories of patriarchal and Hebrew faith, and faith in the visible Saviour, should be practicable in the case of Christian faith, the completed religious faith which contemplates Christ no longer seen. The faith accordingly which we can see in the disciples after He had "gone away," and the faith which they direct in all who believe through their word, is one, the elements of which are those above described-a thinking of facts belonging to the personal history of God manifest in flesh; realising "things" now that they are no longer seen, things of performance or promise or manifestation of character; and thinking on them with a reasoning which is not of the intellect alone, but of the heart. His own direction to man's faith was, "Abide in me, and I in you." Who was the "I" and the "me"? Necessarily that very Jesus whom the writers of the Gospels knew by face and voice and manner of affection and behaviour to them-the Jesus we know "by their words," that personal uniquely individual Redeemer, the Son of God become for our sakes the Son of man—the human-hearted Messiah who grew up from a human infancy in our sight in favour with God and with man. It can be no indefinite Godhead set before our conception by

reasoning on doctrinal attributes, but the Jesus of history, the Jesus of fulfilled prophecy, of minute biography, and of a definitely promised future. "To have Him ever before us," to "endure as seeing Him, now He is invisible," is to have in habitual, most facile, or rather haunting remembrance, a history-a mass of illustrations of personal qualities and relative affections; words of grace and truth; miraculous helps of all temporal needs, typical of awaiting spiritual and eternal salvations-a mass of divine facts become human, which the heart fuses into a beloved portrait, which it can fill up with affecting details on the call of any individual need or desire of faith faster than the unmoved intellect. What is it to have "Christ dwelling in our hearts by faith," "formed in us," "in us, the hope of glory," when the Spirit has glorified Him by taking of His and showing unto us? What Christ can be in us but the historical Jesus of Nazareth, whom alone we have been taught God manifest in flesh, distinctly realised from the words of those who companied with Him; realised, and, though yet unseen by us, ready to be recognised; an individual being surrounded with distinct facts of hope, which are to be inherited jointly with Him, in "union" with Him, in a place prepared for us by Him, in His and our Father's house, a divine and human heaven, clearly described in outline to us in Heb. xii.? What is it in the mean time to "believe on Him, and not let our heart be troubled"?—the direction He gave at the end of His familiarly-known human life (John xiv. 1). He explained immediately that to know Him was to know the invisible Father, and that they should have known Him in the long time He had been with them. To "believe in" Him thus now must be to think of Him in terms of the Gospel narratives of His sayings and deeds; to think with heart-assuring thoughts of His definite help, of no general but particular perfectly instructed sympathy in any class of troubles from without, and in any fears from within, arising from sinless weaknesses—the help and sympathy brought recognisably to faith's sight by facts of His sufferings, tribulations, and weaknesses of the same kind. Paul's new life was lived by this historically-instructed faith (Gal. ii. 20), a faith holding fast a per

sonal union with Christ the Son of God, who loved him and gave Himself for him. The historical love of Christ constrained him to live unto Him (2 Cor. v. 15)-Him realised in a particular manner, Him "who died for us and rose again." Peter exhibits to us faith advancing on the path of holiness to heaven in constant sight of the historical Jesus-Jesus of a past and of a future alike definite. "Whom having not seen ye love; in whom, though now ye see Him not, yet believing, ye rejoice with joy unspeakable and full of glory, receiving the end of your faith, the salvation of your souls" (1 Pet. i. 8-9). "Through the knowledge of Him who hath called us to glory and virtue . . . are given unto us exceeding great and precious promises, that by these ye might be partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world through lust" (2 Pet. i. 4). John's thoughts were heartrejoicing thoughts of closest relationship, that of "sons" to God, the future gloriousness of which was not yet conceivable by him, but was all embraced in promised closeness of place and nature to the personal Jesus, whose beloved disciple he had been. "We shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is; and every man that hath this hope in him purifieth himself, even as He is pure" (1 John iii. 2-3).

tion of

11. A verifying illustration by Scriptural language, doctrinal Verificaor practical, of more minute parts of the process of faith, has the process been interspersed in the foregoing chapters. Let the following ing. short consecutive comparison be added.

of believ

attention.

12. The first step of faith in the things of God-viz., arrested Arrested attention leading to remembrance, consideration, and intellectual conviction—was the reason of Jehovah's "getting Himself honour upon Pharaoh,” and of the systematic providence by which He afterwards made "the nations know themselves to be but men," and acknowledge that there is a God that "judgeth on the earth." Israel's shortcoming in this readiness of perception or remembrance was reproached as unbelief throughout their early history; e.g., Deut. i. 32, Ps. lxxviii. 22, 32, and Ps. cvi. 24. In the New Testament it is the explanation of Paul's words (1 Cor. xiv. 22), "Tongues are for a sign, not to them which believe, but to them which

Thinking on facts.

Impres

ciation,

tion.

believe not ;" and of the wayside hearers' failing to attain the faith that cometh by hearing (Mat. xiii. 19). In our Lord's language "little faith" meant want of observation (Mat. xvi. 9), and want of consideration (Mat. viii. 26).

13. That the intellectual process of the believer's acquiring faith is his own thinking upon facts of God's love, universal, national, or personal, appears universally in the Psalms, the fullest Scriptural collection of examples of the practice of faith, and in Paul's chosen illustrations of faith in Heb. xi. The "faith of God's elect" (Titus i. 1), the "faith delivered to the saints" (Jude 3-7), the faith preached by Stephen to the Jewish court (Acts vii.), and by Paul to the synagogues and his Greek audiences, was essentially bodies of definite facts.

14. The proper result of contemplating the things of God— sion, appre- viz., impression, appreciation of their character and importance, recogni- and recognition of their affinity to man's conscious condition -is the meaning of faith widely in the Scriptures, Gen. xlv. 26; Isa. liii. 1-3; 2 Kings xvii. 14; Jonah iii. 5; Luke v. 19; John ii. 11, iii. 18, iv. 50, v. 46, vii. 48, viii. 24, 32, xi. 45; 2 Tim. ii. 13. Unseeing eyes, unhearing ears, hearts that could not be impressed, was the prophesied unbelief of the Jews (Mat. xiii. 14), and that condemned in heathens (Rom. i. 20). The unbelief of Aaron and Moses at the rock (Num. xx. 12) was failure to appreciate the honour due to Jehovah in their action. The unbelief of the Lord's brethren (John vii. 5) and of the Pharisees (v. 38-47) was not recognising His divine character; the cause in the Pharisees being that their minds did not value His Father's praise, but were engrossed by desire for honour from man. Nicodemus's failure in faith was failure to recognise Jesus' description of the motions of the Spirit, which He called earthly things, rudimentary matters of spiritual perception. Extensively in John's writings faith includes recognition of the congruity of the things revealed with man's conscious condition. The Psalms largely illustrate the same condition of faith. They are rich in the language of affinity, attraction, appropriation. "My God"-"my portion "-"my soul thirsteth for Thee "-" in

the multitude of my thoughts within me Thy comforts delight my soul." The necessity of subjective preparation to recognise divine truth is systematically taught in the New Testamentby our Lord, John iii. 19, 20;-by Paul, requiring believers to be "rooted and grounded in love" in order to study successfully God's love, the subject of faith (Eph. iii. 17), and associating real "unfeigned faith" with a "pure heart and a good conscience” (1 Tim. i. 5); and assigning as the reason of the Jews' failure to "profit by hearing the word of God," that they were not “mixed with those that hear it,” i.e., not in spiritual affinity with the whole body of the children of God, an exact description of the Jews' proud, conceited separatism, their national sin and stumbling-block (Heb. iv. 2);—by James (ii. 22), describing Abraham's faith as being perfected, exercised, disciplined to perfectness, by his faithfulness, "his works." Compare 2 Thess. ii. 10 and Rom. i. 17-21 for spiritual affinity associated with belief and unbelief.

with the

15. The intercourse of the heart implied in this spiritual Thinking attraction to the matters of faith's intellectual contemplation heart. -the possession of the thinker's heart by these, filling it with consciousness that comes in emotional reveries, accesses of intense thought, musings not always conscious, so making a hidden life within the life which is visible to others, a life only sometimes impressing its existence upon observers—appears very much in the Psalms; e.g., Ps. xxiii., xxiv., xxx., xlii., li., xxxiv. 8, lxxiii. 23-28, cxii. 1, 4, 7. Isaiah describes richly this life of the heart in God in his twenty-sixth chapter. In apostolic descriptions believing "fills the believer with peace and joy" (Rom. xv. 13). It is a reasoning of the heart (Rom. x. 10), an admiring contemplation (2 Thess. i. 10), making riches of inward enjoyment (2 Cor. iv. 6-15, James ii. 5), in which the heart "sings to itself of its happiness, and makes melody to the Lord" (Eph. v. 19).

an act, but

16. The idea inseparable from faith's being a thinking of Faith not the heart upon the things of God-that it is characteristically act of not an act, but a state of the believer's spirit-is included in spirit; faith's expressions in a great mass of cases throughout the Psalms, and in the subjective notices of it in the New Testa