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FAITH AND THE FAITH

A MANUAL OF
SHORT DAILY PRAYERS
FOR FAMILIES
Compiled by
The Rev. SAMUEL HART, D.D.

12iTjo. Printed in red and black.
Cloth. $0.60 net.
LONGMANS. GREEN, AND CO.

FAITH
AND THE FAITH
Che ^oljlen Hectare* 1914

By
SAMUEL HART
DEAN OF BERKELEY DIVINITY SCHOOL

LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO.
POUBTH AVENUE & 80TH STEEET, NEW YOBK
LONDON, BOMBAY, AND CALCUTTA
1914

Copyright, 1914, by
SAMUEL HART, D.D.

THE
JOHN BOHLEN LECTURESHIP
John Bohlen, who died in this city on the twenty-
sixth day of April, 1874, bequeathed to trustees a
fund of one hundred thousand dollars, to be dis
tributed to religious and charitable objects in accord
ance with the well-known wishes of the testator.
By a deed of trust, executed June 2, 1875, the
trustees under the will of Mr. Bohlen transferred
and paid over to " The Rector, Church Wardens,
and Vestrymen of the Church of the Holy Trinity,
Philadelphia," in trust, a sum of money for certain
designated purposes, out of which fund the sum of
ten thousand dollars was set apart for the endow
ment of The John Bohlen Lectureship, upon the
following terms and conditions : —
The money shall be invested in good substantial and safe
securities, and held in trust for a fund to be called The John
Bohlen Lectureship, and the income shall be applied annually
to the payment of a qualified person, whether clergyman or
layman, for the delivery and publication of at least one hun
dred copies of two or more lecture sermons. These Lectures
shall be delivered at such time and place, in the city of Phila
delphia, as the persons nominated to appoint the lecturer shall

THE JOHN BOHLEN LECTURESHIP
from time to time determine, giving at least six months notice
to the person appointed to deliver the same, when the same
may conveniently be done, and in no case selecting the same
person as lecturer a second time within a period of five years.
The payment shall be made to said lecturer, after the lectures
have been printed and received by the trustees, of all the
income for the year derived from said fund, after defraying
the expense of printing the lectures and the other incidental
expenses attending the same.
The subject of such lectures shall be such as is within the
terms set forth in the will of the Rev. John Bampton, for the
delivery of what are known as the " Bampton Lectures," at
Oxford, or any other subject distinctively connected with or
relating to the Christian Beligion.
The lecturer shall be appointed annually in the month of
May, or as soon thereafter as can conveniently be done, by the
persons who, for the time being, shall hold the offices of Bishop
of the Protestant Episcopal Church of the Diocese in which is
the Church of the Holy Trinity; the Rector of said Church;
the Professor of Biblical Learning, the Professor of Sys
tematic Divinity, and the Professor of Ecclesiastical History,
in the Divinity School of the Protestant Episcopal Church in
Philadelphia. In case either of said offices are vacant the others may nom
inate the lecturer.
Under this trust, the Reverend Samuel Hart, D.D.,
LL.D., D.C.L., Dean of Berkeley Divinity School,
Middletown, Connecticut, was appointed to deliver
the lectures for the year 1914.

CONTENTS LECTURE I
FAITH
Plan and Purpose 
I. New Testament uses of the word
Progress in its apprehension
in the Gospels, fidelity and trust
in St. Paul, a £a/»0>a: . . '.
in Hebrews, a source of knowledge .
in St. John, the verb, victory and life
Faith, the principle of religion
II. Note on the words niGtiZ, -fides, faith,
belief, trust
Value of variety in words
III. The faith; use of the article .
Revisers' stress on tenses and the
exaggeration of distinctions
Examples of ' the faith ' .
question as to meaning
it does not mean the Creed
Jewish priests became believers
St. Paul kept his belief
St. Jude bids to contend for belief
IV. Importance of faith ....
and of its expression .
' the faith ' in Latin sense .
vii

PAGE 1
3
5 6
9 9
10 11

viii CONTENTS PAGE
Faith in God; fides qua creditur,
fides cui creditur . . .28
V. Objects of faith do not change ... 29
knowledge of them grows .... 29
phraseology may alter, but not truth . 30
LECTURE II
FAITH IN GOD
Faith and its expression ... .31
I. Faith implies a personal relation ... 32
Meaning of faith in a person . . .33
All faith is really in God ... 33
God never known except by faith . . 34
II. How we have come to faith in God . .35
How we approve faith in Him . . .36
But faith comes from Him because He is 38
Its great truth, that God is One . . .40
Not an easy truth, formerly or now . 41
III. Jewish monotheism largely henotheism . . 42
And failed to apprehend integral one-ness 43
But poets and prophets gained faith in one
living God  44
Their faith in the Wisdom or Word of God
and in the Spirit or Life of God . 45
Seen in the later books of the Canon and in
extra-canonical writings ... 46
Quickened at the beginning of the Gospel 48
made distinct in Christ's teaching . 50
IV. Faith here preceded the faith . . . .52
inspired by reality, leading to a person 53
The Spirit known later than the Son, though
we might expect the contrary 54
This is pure faith, in thought, life, knowledge 56

CONTENTS ix
PAGE
V. The varied contents of our Creed . . .57
But all are matters of faith . . .58
Why the Church believed the Divine Son and
Spirit, that God is indeed living and real 58
The Creed followed upon faith ... 60

LECTURE III
FAITH IN JESUS CHRIST
Truth made known by faith expressed in
words ;
The use of words as symbols . . .61
I. Matters of history and of observation
may lead to questioning and inference
This is the working of faith and reason
The doctrine of the Word
leads to that of His Incarnation
II. The life of Jesus Christ on earth .
Questions about Him; He was certainly
But He claimed to be more than man
What the Twelve believed of Him .
and what they said
What Paul believed and said .
Faith preceded the faith .
and prepared for it .
III. Faith real, though not clearly defined
The Sermon on the Mount
The title of Son of Man .
Christ's question and Peter's confession 80
IV. Connection of the Messiah and the Son of God 82
Earliest revelation of this .
The certainty of it soon seen
V. Teaching of the theology of John and Paul
All did not learn in the same way .
Formulas not to be depreciated .

62 64
65 66
676970717273
7577 7878
79

84
868788

CONTENTS
PAGE
Possible need of modification .... 89
The truth ever the same  90

LECTURE IV
FAITH IN THE SPIRIT
The Spirit, the Life of God . . . .91
I. Revealed in early days  92
in psalms and prophecies . . . .93
and in expectation  93
Assumed in earliest parts of Gospels . . 94
in all teachings of Christ and His Apostles 95
His revelation in a Body  96
II. This the dispensation of the Spirit . . .97
Its beginning attended by wonderful acts and
words  97
The balance between freedom and order . 99
St. Paul to the Corinthians . . .100
The strangeness of the new world . .101
III. 1. The Spirit of faith  102
Faith one of His greatest gifts . .103
and the test of all seeming gifts . .104
2. Faith in the Spirit
recognized as a person . . . .106
personally given and acting . . .107
IV. Yet this faith not defined . .108
The third part of the Creed . . .108
No additions to it at Nicaea . . . .109
The additions at Chalcedon . . .110
The Spirit is not fully revealed . .111
and confession follows revelation .112

CONTENTS xi
PAGE
East and West not in agreement as to the
Procession  113
Have we yet a full knowledge of Him by
faith?  114
V. The Faith as to the Spirit waiting for com
plete faith in the Spirit . . . .115
An undefined faith shown in Church, Scrip
tures, Sacraments, sanctification . .116
Increase in the use of gifts prepares for
the revelation of the future . . .117

LECTURE V
THE LIFE OF FAITH
Life grows out of Faith and Faith leads to
confession  118
I. Faith has to do with the life of the soul . .119
Shown in Hebrews xi  120
in St. John  121
in St. Paul  121
II, The life of the soul is God's gift . . .122
in the stages of creation . . . .123
in the process of salvation .... 124
traced God-ward and man-ward . . 125
conversion, salvation, victory . . .126
III. The life of the soul is sacramental . .128
The sacramental idea  129
in nature, in thought  130
in the soul  I30
The Sacraments of the Gospel call for faith
however they are regarded . . . .131
So every act of Christian life . . • .133

xii CONTENTS PAGE
IV. This sacramental life cannot be defined . 134
Beliefs lie beneath words .... 135
and agree when words are at variance . 136
In all sacramental acts  137
V. Individual faith and organic utterance . .138
in Creeds  139
in worship and ordinances . . . .140
where words of controversy have no place 141
The faith uttered attempts to express faith
which already exists  142
Value of old terms, which will continue . . 143
but must not hinder generosity of expres
sion  144
Faith shall ever endure  144

LECTURE I
FAITH
St. Luke xviii. 8.
apa eipijaei TTjy tt'iotiV inl rijr yjjc ;
" Shall he find faith on the earth? "
[Margin of revised versions ; " Shall he find the faith
on the earth? "]
The form of the title of these lectures,
you will note, is borrowed from that of a
recent series of the Bampton Lectures. My
purpose, however, is not to attempt to follow
either the method or the argument of these
discourses on Creed and the Creeds; to at
tempt to do so would be presumptuous in
the extreme. It is rather my desire to
inquire into the relation of Faith, in the
varied New Testament and theological uses
of the word, to what we have come to know
as the Faith — that is to say the statement,
in creeds or other received formularies, of
certain great doctrines held and taught by

2 FAITH AND THE FAITH
the Christian Church. The full consideration
and study of the inquiry thus propounded
would require more time than is assigned to
these lectures and far more learning and
thought than the lecturer has at his com
mand; but it will not be amiss, I venture
to say, to state the question which the topic
presents, to point out certain lines along
which we can look for its clear enunciation
and perhaps for its answer, and to suggest
certain applications to our study and our
teaching of great intellectual and practical
truths. If to-day I may ask your attention to
the consideration of what is immediately sug
gested by the subject stated, I shall hope
in the lectures which follow to make special
applications to the Christian teaching in
regard to the Nature of God, the Incarna
tion of the Word, the Work of the Spirit,
and the Life of the Christian. May the
Spirit of truth and of discipline inspire our
minds and guide our thoughts and lead us
in the path of truth!

FAITH

No form of words is sufficient to define
faith, as no study of words is sufficient to
explain it. When asked for a definition,
we repeat the first verse of the wonderful
chapter of the Epistle to the Hebrews in
which heroes of faith are honored and tri
umphs of faith rehearsed; when bidden to
tell of its place in the life of the soul of
man, we recall what the great Apostle taught
as to the righteousness of man derived by
it from the righteousness of God. Or per
chance, without offering a definition, we go
back to the words in which the Evangelists
have preserved the Lord's teaching as to
the power and the results of faith in Him
self and in the Father, or we look at the
later words of the beloved disciple who tells
of the energy of faith as it reaches into the
world unseen and brings its power into this
world of things seen and recreates it. From
such a review, covering the whole of the New
Testament revelation, we gain an inspiration
of belief and of action; but we do not thus
obtain the definition which for careful

4 FAITH AND THE FAITH
thought we need. And we but confuse our
selves when we carry the words of one sacred
writer without adaptation into the teaching
of another, or read a lesson of practical duty
as if it were a formal setting forth of doc
trinal truth, or quote a text without looking
back to see how it is introduced and read
ing on to learn the application which is
made of it, or take any item in a progressive
revelation — and the revelation of the New
Testament, as really as that of the Old, is
progressive — as if it closed the statement of
that element of truth with which it has to
do. The synoptic Evangelists could not have
taught explicitly St. Paul's doctrine of justi
fication by faith; St. Paul could not have
written the definition of faith which is given
in the Epistle to the Hebrews; the writer of
that Epistle could not have expressed a
conviction of the regenerating and new-
creating power of belief in the phraseology
of St. John. We may well learn from the
sacred writers how simple thoughts and
words are the only possible introduction to
full knowledge and profound utterances of

FAITH 5
great truths; we may also learn from them
how, in knowledge and in utterance and in
life as well, we should carry ourselves along
towards perfection.
Let us look, then, at the progress which
we can discern in men's apprehension of
the meaning of Faith. In the Old Testa
ment it has already, as the Hebrew word
in different modes implies, both the care of
one who carries a child in the arms and
the trustfulness of the child who is thus
safely carried, the meaning of trust and
that of trustworthiness, the belief of one who
takes another at his word and the fidelity
of one who has given his word. " Faithful
Abraham," convinced of the faithfulness of
the God whom he had come to know, became
the father of all those who have faith; so the
record of ancient times is interpreted for us
by an Apostle of the New Covenant.* " The
righteous man finds life by reason of his
fidelity " ; so the utterance of a prophet of
far later day furnishes a text for the preach
ing of the same Apostle.t
* Genesis xv. 6; Romans iv. 11.
t Hebrews ii. 4; Romans i. 17.

6 FAITH AND THE FAITH
And this twofold use of the word is found
in the New Testament even in the simple
records of the beginnings of its revelation.
The " faith " of the early evangelistic records
is sometimes man's fidelity to a trust, trust
worthiness, fides in its classical sense; as for
instance, in the Lord's enumeration of justice
and mercy and faith as the weightier mat
ters of the law or in His commendation of
the faithful and prudent steward.* But it
is more often man's trust in the heavenly
Father or in Christ Himself, fiducia as it
would be accurately expressed in Latin, as
over and again we read that the Lord acted
on His sight or His knowledge or recognition
of men's confidence in Him, or that He
lamented their lack of that confidence with
out which His power could not fully act.t
Whether in a few cases the word is so used
as to imply or look towards a different sense,
we must consider later.
It is in St. Paul that we find this sense
of fiducia, of trust in a divine person, made
a foundation-stone of theological teaching.
* Matthew xxiii. 23, xxiv. 45.
t E. g., Matthew ix. 2, xiii. 58, xvii. 20.

FAITH 7
Although it is certainly an error to affirm
that St. Paul made the doctrine of justifica
tion by Faith, articulus (whether we trans
late it "an article" or "the article") stantis
vel cadentis ecclesiae, or that he built all
teaching as to Christian belief or conduct
upon it, there can be no doubt that both
negatively and positively he deemed it of
great importance that this doctrine should
be held and taught. It involves so much in
itself, it touches upon so many other things
which concern truth and duty, it had so
powerful an influence upon himself in his
religious experience, it was by him so ear
nestly applied, that we cannot wonder that
the faith by which we believe (fides qua
creditur) should stand forth as a principle
and foundation of Christian life for all the
generations to which the influence of the
great Apostle can reach.
But when the definition of faith came
from the lips or the pen of the author of
the Epistle to the Hebrews, it is evident that
an advance had been made in Christian
thought on this subject. He drew his argu
ment, we cannot but remember, from the

8 FAITH AND THE FAITH
same words in the prophet Habakkuk
which had been to St. Paul the starting-
point of his argument as to the faith
through which comes justification or right
eousness. " The righteous man shall have
life through his fidelity — his faithfulness.
We are men of fidelity for getting pos
session of soul — niareooS eis nepncoir}6iv ipvxyS
— men of faith for acquirement of person
ality " ; * we can think the meaning better
than we can express it. And then, as by a
sudden inspiration which passed beyond the
bound of former thought, but for which
former thought had prepared, the writer
gives us, not so much a definition after all,
but a lesson as to what faith is and does:
"Ear iv de nians e\ni8,o)xkvoov •vnosrao'iS, npay-
fxarwv e'XeyxoSov fiXeitojxevwv. "But faith ex
ists as reality of what we hope for, as proof
of things that we cannot look at " ; " Faith
assures us that the objects of our hopes have
a foundation, that things which we cannot
test by our senses are real." t
With such words this writer, in his mo-
* Hebrews x. 38, 39.
t Hebrews xi. 1.

FAITH 9
ment of lofty inspiration, declares that the
faith of fidelity and trust is a source of
knowledge, bringing truth to the soul as
really as the eye brings truth to the mind.
That which to St. Paul is a ' grace '
(xapio-fxoi), a condition of right spiritual
relations, is to him a means of revelation of
the unseen; it is an assurance of the reality
of what has entered the soul as hope; it is
a proof that some things are true which
are beyond the limits of perception by the
senses. And this is the faith which is, as
Bishop Westcott has taught us, in things
seemingly small as in things certainly great,
a principle of knowledge, a principle of
power, a principle of action.* It is not at
all difficult to see that a large part of the
acts of our lives are regulated by faith,
while we are sure that from it come all our
most profound learning and all our bravest
deeds, so that upon it depends all that is
rightly called character with all that char
acter implies.
St. John in his writings rarely speaks of
faith; outside of the Apocalypse (where it
* The Historic Faith, I.

10 FAITH AND THE FAITH
occurs in a few notable places *) he uses the
noun but once, and that is when he bids
us remember that faith is the victory which
is victorious over the world.t But as I do
not need to remind you, he uses the cognate
verb which we are forced to translate by
' believe ' over and over again. We recall
how at the beginning of his Gospel he speaks
of blessings which come to those who believe
on the name of the incarnate Word; how
he records the Lord's declaration that the
love of God had sent His Son into the world
that all who believe in Him should have
eternal life; how he has preserved for us
Christ's high-priestly prayer with its lofty
petition for all who at any time should be
lieve in Him; and how in his Epistle he
touches in every way on the blessedness and
power of believing, even more emphatically
than St. Paul dwells on the efficacy of
faith.t And St. John's conception of be
lieving is, I think, plainly shown by the fact
that he makes this constant use of the verb.
Believing is for him an act of life, or rather
* E. g., ii. 12, xiii. 10. f L «*>!"> v. 4.
t John i. 12, iii. 16, xvii. 20; I. John iii. 23.

FAITH 11
in his conviction spiritual life consists in be
lieving. We see this in his record of the
lofty teaching of the sacramental discourse
based on the miracle of feeding the multitude
in the wilderness: "He that believeth hath
eternal life " ; and with like words he draws
to the end of his longest Epistle: " Who is
he that overcometh the world but he that
believeth?" "Ye have eternal life, ye who
believe in ( eis ) the name of the Son of
God." *
Thus faith is shown to be the very prin
ciple of Christ's religion, and (we may ven
ture to say) of all that is true in any religion.
Beginning with fidelity, passing to confi
dence and trustfulness — no mean qualities,
these — it shows itself a source of knowledge
and proves itself a life. It stands high
among God's gifts to us, having as superior
to itself only that supreme gift of reason
by which man must test the truth of every
thing which is presented to the mind or the
spirit; it crowns humanity with a beauty all
its own, it looks with assurance for the ful
filment of ever widening hope, it proves the
•John vi. 47; I. John v. 5, 13.

12 FAITH AND THE FAITH
reality of the things not seen which are the
things eternal. II
I may be pardoned for inserting here,
almost by way of parenthesis, a note as to
the imperfection of our language and the
consequent crippling of our thought in re
gard to faith. In English we have the noun
which not only translates but represents the
Greek word for ' faith ' ; it comes to us
through the Latin, which has ultimately the
same stem as the word used by the New
Testament writers. And the meaning of that
stem (n-iS-, jid-) is exactly that which lies at
the basis of the interpretation and extension
of interpretation which we have been thus far
considering. Its ancient meaning was to
' bind ' ; in fact ' bind ' is another word from
the same stem, and thus fides, whence came the
French joy or foi and the English fey now
lengthened into faith, is connected in signifi
cation with the generally accepted derivation
of religio, that which binds together or per
haps ' obliges ' us to duty. But we have
no English verb corresponding to faith, as

FAITH 13
the Greeks have mareveiv and the Latins
fidere. For lack thereof we are forced to
borrow from another stem the verb ' believe,'
which indeed serves our purpose fairly well,
but which hinders the unity and continuity
of our thought. We cannot without an effort
make the nouns ' faith ' and ' belief ' mean
exactly the same; nor should we be willing
to substitute the latter for the former in
reading and studying the Bible. The stem
of ' belief ' after the prefix be- (or ge-) is
that which still appears in our colloquial
word for choice; that is 'lief which we
desire or like, or that which we deem val
uable, and then that in which we are willing
to place our confidence; and, whether we
think of the derivation or not, it is not easy
to make the verb which we are forced to
use correspond to the noun which it seems
to us we naturally use. We believe many
assertions which are in no wise matters of
faith; we believe many persons of whom we
should not be willing to say that we have
faith in them or even (and here we have
made in following the ancients an important
difference) that we believe in them. There

14 FAITH AND THE FAITH
is still a third word which is both verb and
noun, and which in its form as in its use
betokens truth and in its derivation means
belief, the word ' trust ' ; it is a good and
strong word, but it does not carry with it
now a sacred connotation. There is value
of a certain kind in this variety of words
and of sounds, a value which good trans
lators into English — notably those who have
given us our vernacular Bible and Prayer
Book — have discerned and have commended
to us. But, on the other hand, one has to
regret that, in writing on faith and study
ing its divine meaning, we are forced to
use a verb which gives neither the sound
nor the equivalent signification of the noun
which is constantly employed. Let this,
however, serve for apology; we return to
the consideration of New Testament teaching.
Ill
Our study of the use of the noun ' faith '
and the verb ' believe,' or rather of the
Greek words which they represent, in the
New Testament, brings us to the considera-

FAITH 15
tion of the meaning of the word ' faith '
when in Greek it has, and when in English
it ought to have, the article. Is the mean
ing of The Faith distinctly different from
that of Faith? Does ' the faith ' ever mean
in the New Testament the Creed or the sub
stance of the Creed, the statement of truths
or doctrines believed, as when in the Cate
chism the child is bidden to rehearse the
Articles of his Belief? The answer to the
question must be based, in part at least, on
technical considerations, but it is certainly
important and not without interest to the
student. It does no injustice to the learning of
the recent revisers of the current English
version of the New Testament to say that
in many cases they have held so closely to
the form of the Greek text that they have
failed to present with exactness its meaning
in English. In fact, it seems certain that
they were so familiar with the original, and
had it so constantly in their minds, that it
required an effort for them to consider just
how it should be presented in a translation
into our language; they thought the New

16 FAITH AND THE FAITH
Testament more easily in Greek than in
their mother tongue. Thus they seem to
have labored to represent the Greek perfect
tense by the English form which bears the
same name, and the aorist tense by the simple
past of our language. Of course, they could
not do this always; unavoidable considera
tions of sense sometimes forbade; but they
did it in many places where a man or
woman in the habit of reading and speak
ing good English, yet unacquainted with
the classics, would instinctively make a cor
rection, and where such a one when he hears
it read in the revised version knows that a
correction ought to be made. Tenses do
not run parallel in languages of diverse
moulds, and they cannot be made so to run.
It is largely thus with the article, though
here the error is oftener inherited from the
old version than in the case of the tenses.
The Greek uses it in cases where it is not
in the least emphatic, but is rather " con
tinuous," denoting a former, often anarthrous,
use of the word to which it is prefixed, and
has the form of a mild demonstrative; and
from this it gets a sort of unemphatic pos-

FAITH 17
sessive force, so that it is best rendered by
such a possessive. Besides this, there are
cases in which nouns without the article,
especially those which have by some sort
of personification gained the qualities of
" proper " nouns, have thus become emphatic.
An example of the fact that both the use
and the omission of the article may give a
distinctive meaning is seen in the two pas
sages in the book of the Acts in which we
learn of the gift of the Holy Spirit by
means of the laying-on of the Apostles'
hands. We read in the eighth chapter that
Peter and John prayed for the baptized
converts at Samaria that they might receive
Holy Spirit (nvev/xa ayiov), and that when
they had laid their hands upon them they
did receive Holy Spirit; that Simon Magus
saw that by their imposition of hands the
Spirit (to nvevfxa) was given, and thereupon
asked that he might buy the power of con
ferring Holy Spirit (nvevfia ayiov).* But
later, in the nineteenth chapter, we read that
St. Paul questioned some disciples at
Ephesus, asking them if when they became
* Acts viii. 15, 18, 19.

18 FAITH AND THE FAITH
disciples they received Holy Spirit (nvevfia
ayiov), and that they confessed that they
did not then hear of Holy Spirit; where
upon he laid hands on them and the Holy
Spirit (rd nvev^a to ayiov) came upon them.*
It certainly is not true here, however it
may look in other cases, that, as applied
to the Spirit of God, the word nvevjxa with
the article means His Person and without the
article designates His operation upon the
souls of men.t Again, one who reads the
earlier chapters of the Epistle to the Romans,
accepting as invariable the canon that vofios
means law in general and 6 vojios means the
law given to the Jews, the Mosaic law, will
find that the canon, helpful as it is in the study
of some important passages, fails in others
which are more difficult even if perhaps less
important. Nopos does sometimes mean the
law given to the Israelites by Moses ; 6 vofios
may mean God's general dispensation
through law.t In the Epistle to the Gala
tians we find an example of what I have
* Acts xix. 2, 6.
t See, however, Milligan, Ascension, etc., pp. 204, 199.
% Galatians iii. 17 ff., where both the English and the Amer
ican revisers translate vd/toc by ' the law.'

FAITH 19
called the distinctive article applied to voyios
followed presently by a like use with the
word nians, which will serve to bring our
thoughts back to what we were saying about
this word. " The law, being later than the
covenant," says St. Paul, " cannot annul
the covenant. The inheritance did not spring
out of law; the law was brought in for
transgressions' sake," and so on.* He speaks
with a perfectly natural common-sense use
or omission of the article, according as he
needs it or does not need it for the carrying
on of his argument, which is no less forceful
because it is colloquial. From this, as so
often, he passes to speak of faith. " All are
reckoned sinners in Scripture, in order that
the promise through faith (did niareoos) of
Jesus Christ might be given to those who
have faith (rots marevovaiv). But before the
faith (rf)v m'anv) came we were kept in ward
under law (vnd vofiov)," t and so on. Has the
word ' faith,' then, by being spoken or read

* In Romans ii. 12-15, the English revisers distinguish be
tween v6fwr and b vbfwc ; the American revisers go back to the
old version and say always ' the law.'
t Galatians iii. 22, 23.

20 FAITH AND THE FAITH
with the article, passed into a new meaning?
No one, I suppose, would claim that it is so
in every case; yet it is almost impossible for
any one of us when he hears of ' the faith '
to think otherwise than that the Creed — or
what is substantially the Creed — is meant.
Take the Lord's words at end of His short
parable of the Importunate Widow: "When
the Son of man cometh, shall He find faith
on the earth?" Whatever the context, we
understand by this rendering of the words
that the Speaker suggests that at His return
faith — belief in God and trust in Him, the
quality of fidelity and the grace which jus
tifies — will have been sadly weakened even
if it has not disappeared. But read it, as
the revisers in the margin read it, because
the Greek word for ' faith ' has the article,
" When the Son of Man cometh, will He
find the faith on the earth? " and it would
require a mental effort to persuade ourselves
that it is not implied that at the last there
shall be danger of a loss of acceptance of
the formulas of Christian belief and of neg
lect to confess the fundamental truths of
the Christian religion. As we have been in

FAITH 21
the habit of reading the words, they urge
us to hold fast to faith; as it is suggested
that- we may read them, they warn us against
the loss of the Creed. Either would • be a
great and grievous calamity, and either would
to a serious extent involve the other; but
there can be no doubt that if we would
keep the exact meaning of the Lord's warn
ing we must read, not ' the faith,' but ' faith.'
The revisers merely meant to tell us that
there is an article in the text — a fact which
does not concern the ordinary reader.
I have made these excuses by way of in
troducing a really important question as
to the meaning of certain passages in the
New Testament which are generally thought
to apply the words ' the faith ' to the Creed
or what was practically its equivalent in the
early days. When we read, early in the
Acts of the Apostles, that " a great multi
tude of the [Jewish] priests were giving
their obedience to the faith," * it seems al
most to tell us that they were making pro
fession of Christianity in some set form of
words. Further, when we find St. Paul de-
* Acts vi. 7.

22 FAITH AND THE FAITH
daring, as he awaits the martyr's death and
the martyr's crown, " I have fought the
good fight, I have finished the course, I
have kept the faith," * he seems to be bearing
witness not only to his fulfilment of duty
as a disciple in the conflict and race of life
but also to his maintenance of Christian
doctrine as a preacher and apostle. Still
more, when we find an apostolic man of the
second generation — for such we may think
the writer of St. Jude's Epistle to have
been — urging upon his disciples the duty of
" contending for the faith which was in one
act delivered to the saints," t most of us feel
quite sure that we have a proof of the early
existence of a formula known as " the faith,"
so early indeed that it must have come from
literally apostolic days. Now, we can hardly
doubt that from the very first there must
have been some confession of belief on the
part of those who came to be baptized, as
in the ancient form of words " I believe
that Jesus Christ is the Son of God " ; and
it is practically certain that we can trace
back to the close of the first century the
* II. Timothy iv. 7. f Jude 3.

FAITH 23
essentials of the more full formula which
we call the Apostles' Creed. But it seems
quite certain that " the faith " in the Scrip
tures is not used in a sense which passes
beyond what we have noted in the Gospels
and the Epistles as its simple and normal
but progressive meaning.
Look at the texts which have just been
quoted. When the official leaders of the Jew
ish people began to profess allegiance to the
new principle of faith in the name of Christ
which the Apostles were preaching and which
was manifested with great power in the
working of the Spirit of God, when they
believed the testimony given to Him as the
living Christ in Whose death they had but
lately borne a part, the pleased narrator
tells us not only that the Word of God
was increasing and the number of disciples
multiplying exceedingly, but also that even
of the priests a great multitude were giving
submission to that power of faith which was
beginning to prevail. When St. Paul had
boldness to say at the end of his career that
he had finished his fight in the good conflict
into which he had been sent and had run

24 FAITH AND THE FAITH
the goal in the course which had been
marked out for him, he dropped the meta
phor — as was his wont — and added that he
could be sure that he had held fast and
still was holding fast his faithful allegiance.
We do not hesitate to render " I have fin
ished my course " ; why can we not read before
this phrase, " I have fought my good fight,"
and after it, "I have kept my faithfulness
to my Lord and my trust in Him"? What
more can we hope to mean, we whose lips
constantly repeat the venerable words of the
Creed, when at our life's close we respond
to them, "All this I stedfastly believe"?
And St. Jude's solemn and almost stern
exhortation that we should fight for faith,
for faith which was by one great revelation
and act of grace handed over to those who
were called to holiness * — does not this read
a solemn and deep-searching lesson of duty
when we refer it to the principle of our
belief, even if thence we pass to its expres
sion? To contend for our belief, for our right
and duty to believe, for that principle whence
springs our life, for that gift which belongs
* amzf = ' all at once.'

FAITH 25
to holiness and is the basis of holiness — to
contend in this sense for faith, the faith which
gives and strengthens our union with Christ,
that faith in Him which is His in us — this
is no easy thing to require, no little thing
to do. But to lose it, so St. Jude's argu
ment passes on, is to lose godliness and to
deny the Master. And thus the beginning
of this Epistle is congruous with the end,
as the central word of each is the same:
" Ye, beloved, building yourselves up on
that most holy faith which ye have, praying
in [the] Holy Spirit, keep yourselves in
God's love, waiting for the mercy of our
Lord Jesus Christ unto life eternal."* It
is an echo of the Gospel: "Whoso hath faith
in the Son hath life eternal." f
IV
The New Testament, then, dwells on faith
as a grace of character and principle of life,
of action, and of knowledge, not passing
quite over into the meaning which is sug
gested when we speak of our confession of
belief as the Faith which we hold and main-
* Jude 20, 21. t John iiJ- 36.

26 FAITH AND THE FAITH
tain. This fact may help us to understand,
in regard to certain aspects of Christian be
lief and their expression in words which we
propose to consider, the immense impor
tance of faith and of its right use. That the
soul of man should be faithful because of
its personal relation with God — a relation
which is perhaps best expressed by the old
word ' affiance ' — that it should have that
trust in God revealed in His Son which
brings it into His very life, that man should
learn truth far beyond any evidence of the
senses because faith makes hope real and
proves the invisible, all this is of the very
essence of the soul's life and growth. It
cannot be fully described, because it cannot
be brought within limitations; its operation
and effect cannot be told in words, because
they are spiritually discerned. From this it
follows, that any form of statement in re
gard to matters of faith — whether we mean
the faculty or grace or the truth divinely
made known — must be inadequate and liable
to correction. Our soundest knowledge, to
adapt the great Hooker's words, is that we
know not truth as indeed it is, and our

FAITH 27
safest eloquence concerning it is our silence.
Yet speak we must, for truth must be con
fessed; and think we must, or the greatest
gift of God within our souls will perish.
And thus the Apostle taught in the Epistle
in which he was exalting the power of faith:
" In heart " — or in our phrase, in soul — " is
men's faith, by mouth is their confession; the
former brings justification (or righteous
ness), the later brings salvation (or perfec
tion) ." * Selfishness of belief is selfishness
of truth; as he who learns but does not teach
has no fruitful knowledge, so he who believes
but makes no confession of his belief has
not a living faith. It is not enough for man
to find how he may be just before God;
he must reach far beyond this to that per
fection which can be attained only in holi
ness. Supreme faith is supreme truth; and
supreme truth must be both known and
declared. Therefore it is not amiss, pass
ing beyond the classical and the New Testa
ment use of words, to call that which we
believe our ' belief ' and the object of our
faith our ' faith ' ; we thus assume a new
* Romans x. 10.

28 FAITH AND THE FAITH
responsibility for definition and for careful
ness of thought. We do indeed feel that
there is a sacredness about belief in a per
son or faith in a truth, which will not allow
us to apply the phrase lightly to others than
God; but we allow ourselves, and we can
scarce help it, as was just said, to call our
confession by the name of belief and our
apprehension of truth by the name of ' the
faith.' We may not forget the source whence
we derive our knowledge; but we must
certify to our knowledge and certify more
over that we have tested this knowledge by
our heaven-bestowed power of reason. Thus
it comes to pass that in the historic Church
of Christ we have not only fides qua creditur
but also fides cui creditur, not only faith by
which we believe but also the faith which we
believe. The former is of the very essence
of religion, the latter is necessary for its ex
pression and extension; the former belongs
to its revelation, the latter is called forth by
its history. Of the former I have spoken
somewhat to-day; some considerations as to
the latter are to be presented later.

FAITH 29

V

Let me, however, add one consideration
here, as connected with what has been thus
far suggested and introductory to what is
to follow. The objects of faith do not
change; they are all, in the last analysis,
visions of the unchanging and eternal God.
The knowledge which comes from faith does
grow, but its growth is in scope and in
exactness ; the form of thought, of expression,
of assent must change, not as a rule easily
nor rapidly, but with the lapse of ages and
the modifications of philosophical thought,
of language, of the boundaries of our igno
rance. The phraseology of the fourth cen
tury has been long retained, though some
times not without adaptation or an effort at
explanation; but those who decided on it
did not consider it absolutely final, and it is
possible that it may not endure for as many
more centuries as those in which it has been
so well used. There was a controversy in
our Church not so very long ago over certain
words spoken as by authority: " Fixedness of
interpretation is of the essence of the Creeds."

30 FAITH AND THE FAITH
Few of us would insist on that form of
words now. But, God helping us, we shall
ever affirm that fixity of truth is of the
essence of faith, and that the Christian faith
is truly held and taught by those who receive
the revelation of essential verities and de
clare it under the guidance of the Spirit as
He ever leads the faithful in the way of
truth.*
* John xvi. 13; the reading with iv and the dative seems
to give the better meaning.

LECTURE II
FAITH IN GOD
St. Mark xi. 22.
"Exere iriariv Oeoii.
" Have faith in God."
In the former lecture we undertook to
study the meaning and power of faith as
they are taught in the New Testament and
accepted by Christians. We found that
faith, which is primarily fidelity and then
trust or affiance, involves a personal rela
tion to one whom we believe and in whom
we believe, and that it is thus a test of
character. We found that faith is also a
source of knowledge, and that it tells us of
things hoped for, unseen and eternal, as our
senses and the evidence of others tell us of
things present, seen and temporal. We
noted that, though faith baffles full definition,
it can yet find expression in words; and that,
though the use of the term is almost cer-
31

32 FAITH AND THE FAITH
tainly later than New Testament times, ' the
Faith ' has come to mean a recognized ex
pression of the great facts which faith has
brought to our souls and our hearts. We
glanced at the relation between the eternal
truths with which faith has chiefly to do
and their necessarily imperfect expression;
and to-day we are to look a little more
definitely at faith in God which we hold and
the faith in God which finds utterance in
our confession and our worship.

Faith, above all things else,- is distinctly a
personal relation. And its highest act, which
is also its most essential and necessary act,
is trust in God and fidelity to God. If its
source is personal and its object is personal,
then it must ultimately rest upon Him in
Whom personality is recognized in its ful
ness, it must finally reach out to Him in
Whom personality is completely expressed.
We can truly say, even at the present stage
of the argument, that if we believe at all
we really believe God and believe in God,
we take His word and put our trust in Him.

FAITH IN GOD 33
Here, at any rate, we can make the distinc
tion, not always observed, indeed, in language
but always confessed when it is brought to
the mind, between believing a person and
believing in a person (credere alicui and
credere in aliquem), both being distinguished
from believing a statement as to a person
or thing (credere aliquem, aliquid, esse). A
large part of our knowledge comes to us
from our belief of other men's knowledge and
honesty; and practically we have no more
doubt of the truth of that to which they
testify than we have of the truth of that to
which our own senses have borne witness.
We believe many men whom we know and
many whom we do not know, without in
curring the charge of credulity or thoughtless
assent; yet there are few men whom we have
so thoroughly tried or whom we hold in such
high esteem that we can say that we believe
in them. God is indeed the only person in
whom we can really believe, the only one on
whom faith can implicitly rest (eni), towards
whom faith can with full confidence reach out
(eis), in whom faith can surely dwell (eV).
We believe, we say, the stability of nature's

34 FAITH AND THE FAITH
laws, the permanence of character, the ulti
mate victory of righteousness ; * but this is
only when we find in those laws the unchang
ing will of God, in that character the reflec
tion of His life, in that victory the uncon
querable strength of His truth. And indeed
we cannot help saying to ourselves that these
things, because they are contingent, may con
ceivably change, but that there can be no
possible change in the will, the life, the truth
of God. If we seek to know somewhat of
faith, we must ask as to our faith in Him,
as He is a person and as we are brought
into personal relations with Him.
And we shall do well to remember, as we
are taught in the Epistle to the Hebrews,
that God has never been known except by
faith, and that worship and service have
never been rendered to Him except on the
basis of faith. " In it the men of older time
had witness borne to them," t as did those
of later days, and as do we. Enoch and
Noah and Abraham, " in the dawn of his
tory's morning," had no more immediate or
* Westeott, The Historic Faith, I.
f Hebrews xi. 2.

FAITH IN GOD 35
more easy access to truth and to the source
of truth than is given to our lot " upon
whom the ends of the world are come " ; nay
rather, they were filled with joy at the pros
pect of seeing this day, the Lord's day and
ours, the day of nearer approach and of
clearer vision.* We walk in the steps of the
father of the faithful, the friend of God,
with humble confidence; but our faith is as
direct as his, while his was a type or shadow
of that whereof we have the very image. By
faith the fathers knew God, and by faith we
know Him ; yet they received not the promise,
because without us they could not attain
perfection. II
We cannot tell how man first came to be
lieve that God is, still less how he came to
have faith in Him. None of us, I venture
to say, can remember how the knowledge of
God first came to his soul or how he was per
suaded that in God he might or should put
his trust. Doubtless, most of us would say,
a father or mother whose every word we
* John viii. 56.

36 FAITH AND THE FAITH
accepted as true told us of Him, and we
believed what was said. Doubtless some
experience, long passed from memory, turned
this confidence in a parent into the beginning
of faith in God. Doubtless our prayers and
the answers to them quickened our faith, and
we came to know God, as we came to know
other persons, by meeting Him and speak
ing with Him and feeling His influence upon
us. Most certainly we know God now by
a real knowledge and are more sure of Him
than we are of any other person, even of
ourselves. We may ask ourselves, as we come to
years of questioning and study, how if we
did not know God we should be led to the
conviction that He is; or if we are forced to
search for a reason for the faith which we
have once had, we may inquire as to its
foundation and the manner of rebuilding
upon it; or we may consider how we should
deal with a man who might tell us intelli
gently and honestly that he was in doubt
whether there is a God or no. And the argu
ment, as we should use it with ourselves or
with others, is a strong one. The physical

FAITH IN GOD 37
world in which we live, and with the phe
nomena of which we are perforce acquainted,
is a world of order and of power, of use
fulness and of beauty; the moral world in
which we find ourselves, and in which we are
brought into contact with other moral beings,
is one which educates character and trains
affection and will, conscience and reason; on
the whole, our world is administered in the
interests of happiness and of virtue; and
most of us find that it bears evidence of being
a world in which moral beings like ourselves
are or may be prepared for a life more
extended than here falls to our lot. All
this might practically lead us to believe that
there is an intelligent Creator with a pur
poseful and benevolent will, Who is also a
moral governor, and Who stands in vital
relations to all that He has made and
especially to the rational agents to whom
He gives so much happiness and power and
responsibility. And, as I was saying, we
press this argument from design or from
moral government upon ourselves when
doubts arise in our minds, or upon others
when for their own sake or for ours they

38 FAITH AND THE FAITH
ask us a reason for the hope that is
in us.
But however confidently we use this line
of thought or of speech, we do not for a
moment think that we are creating in the
mind or the soul the thought of God, or — to
speak more accurately — that we are intro
ducing it into the mind or the soul. We
cannot create it, we cannot even introduce
it, any more than we can create the seeing
eye, or can impart to an eye as yet sightless
the power of vision. We teach the child to
use his eyes, to interpret what they report,
to protect them from harm, to seek relief
in case they receive an injury; but the eye
is part of an organism which lives and grows,
and in the last physical analysis it is the
light already existing without the eye which
has developed it and made it to be what
it is. And in like manner, the soul of man
by faith knows God because God is ; and God
has made the soul of man with an initial and
growing aptitude to know Him, and has
given it the power of faith as He has given
the eye the power of vision, that it may see
Him and in Him may come to the knowl-

FAITH IN GOD 39
edge of truth and righteousness and holiness.
We cannot explain; we can but state the
facts of observation and experience; and we
find that they have been and are the same
in kind, though far differing in degree, in
all the ages and among all mankind. In
quiet ways faith is, as we may say, trans
mitted with other intellectual and spiritual
powers, attracting little attention because it
is so natural and does its work so silently;
while again with mighty power it shows its
stored-up energy and works in heroes the
miracles which adorn the history of the great
company of faithful people. We know that
it worked in men before Abraham made his
confession of God, and gained titles God-
ward and man- ward — Friend of God, Father
of believers — which make him honored in the
history of the world; we know that it was not
Moses alone who endured as seeing the in
visible One; we know that in the annals of
the Christian Church, as in those of the
earlier dispensations, we may read over and
over again the victories of faith; we know
that those annals, rightly read, tell of what
men have patiently suffered and bravely

40 FAITH AND THE FAITH
undertaken because they had faith in the
living God. But how that faith came, save
that it was the gift of God Himself, we can
not tell.
The great revelation of faith, the great
truth which it taught to men of old and
teaches in more profound meaning to us, is
that God is One. There is, as we have seen,
no real faith except in a Divine person; there
is no true faith except in the One God.
Legendary stories tell us how the great
patriarch, inheriting the acknowledgment of
gods many and lords many, the son (it is
said) of an idol-maker, came to the con
fession of one only God as he studied the
starry heavens and saw the workings of
providence and searched the spirit that was
in him. And because he believed in the
one God thus revealed, because he was
the great monotheist of that early time, the
power of his faith has been a mighty inspira
tion; it was entrusted to his descendants
along chosen lines; and kept by them, though
often hardly kept, it is religiously the great
legacy of the Old Covenant to the New.
At the very head of the Law which was

FAITH IN GOD 41
given to the chosen people as they were be
coming a theocratic nation is the declara
tion: "He who is our God is one";* and
this is a truth which can never be abrogated,
which can never cease to hold its power.
It is no easy truth to believe, no easy truth
to understand; the mind of nearly the whole
gentile world, the world outside of the special
covenant, was so set against it that we
wonder when we find a philosopher or a
poet with the power of a seer acknowledging
and teaching the unity of God; and there
is scarce a page of the history of the Jewish
people under judges and kings on which we
do not read of the polytheistic idolatry into
which they persistently fell and from which
they were delivered only at the cost of the
great captivity. We might almost say, if
we dared, that the thought of the unity of
God is not connatural with man's belief in
the divine, as revealed by creation and provi
dence and moral government ; but we declare,
and we must declare, that the great affirma
tion of faith is that God is One, the great
•Deuteronomy vi. 4; translate: "Jahveh is our God; Jahveh
is One; " cf. Exodus vi, 2, 3.

42 FAITH AND THE FAITH
demand of faith is that God be worshipped,
yes and loved, as One. "Hear, O Israel:
our God is One; and thou shalt love Him."
Hence comes every great " categorical im
perative " ; hence comes the irresistible power
of a true faith. This truth, because it is
the greatest of all truths, is difficult beyond
others; and its difficulty, which springs from
its greatness, has led to serious misappre
hensions and denials which mar the history
of its revelation; we may well question
whether it could have been rightly under
stood at the first. Ill
However the religious leaders may have
grasped its full meaning, we can hardly
doubt that the doctrine of one God meant
to the Jewish people for a long time that
they as a nation had but one God, or per
haps that they had but one supreme God;
and they were ready to confess that any
other nation might have another god as
its only or supreme divinity. "Cujus regio,
ejus religio " was more seriously believed

FAITH IN GOD 43
in those ancient days than in the more recent
times when the proverb was made current.
The king of Judah who submitted himself
to the king of Syria felt that he must set
up an altar in the temple at Jerusalem to
the chief god of Syria ; * and the emigrants
brought from the East to the land of Israel
complained that they suffered from lions be
cause they knew not the manner of wor
shipping the god of the country to which
they had been removed.! Thus at times the
monotheism of the Jewish people, when it
was kept from degenerating into polytheism,
did not advance beyond what we call heno-
theism or monolatry, which practically denies
that there is and can be but one living and
true God.
But apart from this error, on which we
do not need now to dwell, the Hebrews
long failed to understand that by the Unity
— or rather the Oneness — of God is meant
much more than is implied by a declaration
that there is but one God. It is true that
the faithful Jew or Christian does worship
* II. Kings xvi. 10 ff. ; cf . II. Chronicles xxv. 14.
t II. Kings xvii. 25 ff.

44 FAITH AND THE FAITH
one God, not two or three, not a hundred
or a thousand; our faith would not tolerate
polytheism, and our reason would not allow
us to recognize equal or practically equal
gods. But our faith goes beyond this, in
declaring that our God, the God of our faith,
is One, not alone or chiefly numerically, but
integrally. If words will serve to express
the thought, one-ness is an essential attribute
of His being; He has in Him all that belongs
to the highest conception of completeness,
of a unity complete in itself, indivisible and
incommunicable. The unity of God is there
fore a different thing from the unity of any
other being, a stone, a plant, an animal, a
man, though the higher we go in the scale
the nearer we approach to the unity of God.
Man has the unity of a person made com
plete by his relationship to other persons;
God has the supreme unity which is not in
deed without relationships, but which has
those relationships within Himself. How
near the faith of the Abrahamic believer was
to attaining this truth we do not know; but
in the days of psalmists and prophets it
began to be apprehended. We feel certain

FAITH IN GOD 45
that the later writers of the Old Testament
did not hold to the oneness of God as do
the modern Jews and the Mohammedans;
the being with whom they stood in such close
relations, whom they worshipped, and from
whom they expected so much, was a one-ly
God but not a lonely God; He was not like
the deity of the Stoics, fate-controlled, or
like the deities of the Epicureans, happy be
cause indifferent to man's joys or sorrows;
such weak conceptions were far from those
who sang the praises of the God of Israel
and lived by His life and for Him.* The
real unity of God, the unity which appeals
to faith and satisfies reason, demands ulti
mately that faith in God which the Christian
Church professes.
Now, this begins to appear in the Old
Testament and in other pre-Christian writ
ings, as indeed its clearer statement appears
for the more part in the New Testament,
in a devotional or religious rather than a
didactic or doctrinal form. The poet and
seer found that his faith in God, the Creator
and Governor of the world and of men, led
* See Medd, The One Mediator, Lecture I.

46 FAITH AND THE FAITH
him to faith in the Wisdom or Word — he
came very near saying the Son — of God.
As he meditated on the meaning of creation,
one poet made Wisdom speak in words
which seem to belong to St. Paul in his
later Epistles, claiming a place as counsellor
and equal of the Most High, planning His
great designs before the world and carrying
them out when the worlds were made.* In
the Psalms we read of the Word (or a
word) of God whereby the heavens were
made;t and though this is parallel to the
phrase in the eleventh chapter of the Epistle
to the Hebrews, " By faith we understand
that the ages were framed by an utterance
of God," t and need not imply a second per
son in the Godhead, yet it almost certainly
led to that " very old teaching of the syna
gogue " in regard to a mediating Word,§
which declared the counsel and might of the
One God of Israel to be effective through
His Word or Wisdom.
And still more often and more distinctly
do we read of the Spirit or Breath or Life
* Proverbs viii. 22 ff. -f- Psalm xxxiii. 6: 131,
t Ml*ari, not Myy. § jnDHD.

FAITH IN GOD 47
of the Almighty as sharing the attributes of
His divinity. Not always, indeed, in words
which must be thus applied, but constantly
in such a way as to suggest it, as far back
as the days of David in an utterance which
is acknowledged by all to be his, and as
late as the time of the Second Isaiah, do we
find such words as these : " The Spirit of
God spake by me, and His Word was on
my tongue " ; " The Lord God and His
Spirit hath sent me." Men had come to a
belief in God's Spirit in a devotional, poetical,
prophetic way, even more distinctly than they
had come to believe in His Word; and in
fact the operation of the living power of
God was more clearly manifest than that of
His reason. Thus, even before the closing
of the canon of the Old Testament, the mind
of the pious Jew had moved towards faith
in the Word of the one eternal God and in
His Spirit. And the sapiental and meditative
writings of the period between the Old Testa
ment and the New show that this faith was
quickened then and that it found still more
clear expression. The thought of a King
Messiah gave way to the expectation of a

48 FAITH AND THE FAITH
divine pre-existent Mediator, the first-born
of God, the heavenly Man, the eternal
Word, the Memra; and with Him was ex
pected the coming of the Holy Spirit,
restoring the gift of prophecy which
had failed since Malachi, God's voice in
Man* Thus the mind of devout men in Israel, of
those who were looking for redemption and
expecting the fulfilment of the promises, had
passed far beyond the rigid monotheism
which had seemed to mark the teaching and
the belief of the earlier days. Faith, holding
to its personal relation to the God of the
fathers, had come to know Him more fully
than the fathers had known Him; faith,
accepted as a source of the highest knowl
edge, had gained an apprehension of the
manner of the life of the living and true
God. Thus it was that, when the approach
of the Gospel was announced, its herald
could proclaim a revelation of the Spirit of
God made by His Son in Whom He was well
* See especially the opening section of the article on the
Trinity in the additional (fifth) volume, p. 308, of Hastings's
Dictionary of the Bible, by Professor Hugh M. Scott.

FAITH IN GOD 49
pleased. The first two chapters of St. Luke's
Gospel bear the strongest evidence that they
reproduce the thoughts, the experience, and
the very words of those who had to do with
the ushering-in of the new covenant. The
phraseology is that of the older covenant —
both narrative and hymns must have been
told and sung originally in Hebrew; yet the
great revelation, wonderful though it was,
found the minds as well as the words of
men prepared for it. " Thy child shall be
great, and shall be called the Son of the
Highest"; "The Holy Spirit shall come
upon thee, and that which shall be born shall
be called holy, the Son of God"; "Blessed
be the Lord God of Israel, for He hath
visited and made redemption for His peo
ple " ; " Unto you is born a Saviour who is
Christ the Lord " — " a victorious Leader,
the Lord anointed, Jahveh Messiah." * The
record of the Baptism is not, we may well
think, as old as the event itself; but we find
no anachronism when we read that at that
early day there was the proclamation of the
Son of God and the open manifestation of
?Luke i. 32, 35, 68; ii. 11.

50 FAITH AND THE FAITH
His Spirit;* for some of those who wit
nessed this great act of consecration were
well prepared for both, as they had come
to faith in the Son and the Spirit of the
eternal Father. The use of the words or
names by the writers of the earlier Gospels
seemed to awaken no surprise and to call for
no explanation; Christ could speak of His
marvellous works as done by the Spirit of
God, and could declare — evidently speaking
of Himself, though privately indeed to His
disciples — that the Father could be known
by none save the Son and he to whom the
Son should reveal Him.t St. John, writing
at a later time and perhaps rather inter
preting than reproducing what Christ had
said, tells us how He called Himself the Son
of God, how He even declared that as a gift
from the Father He possessed the divine
attribute of having life in Himself, and how
He gave the promise of the Spirit who was
His Spirit because the Father's ; t all was
leading up to the revelation which was re
served to the close of the Gospel that the
* Luke iii. 21, 22. f Matthew xi. 27.
t John x. 36, v. 26, xv. 26, xvi. 25.

FAITH IN GOD 51
name of God is the Father and the Son and
the Holy Spirit.*
We may also note how soon and how
naturally the Evangelists began to call Christ
by a name which to them as Hebrews writ
ing in Greek was a very sacred name and
represented the ineffable tetragrammaton of
the older Scriptures, the name which we con
tinue in constant and reverent use though
it does not always recall to us the name
of Jahveh — ' the Lord.' It was the Lord
Who appointed the seventy, the Lord Who
rose from the dead and appeared to His
Apostles, the Lord Whom the beloved dis
ciple recognized on the shore of the lake
after the resurrection.! How naturally and
how constantly Christ Jesus bears the name
in the Epistles needs but to be suggested
here. His place, His first disciples saw, was
with the Almighty Father; in some way He
was the Lord of Whom the historians and
prophets and poets of Israel had spoken.
Their faith was, therefore, in Father and
Son and Holy Ghost before they had framed
* Matthew xxviii. 19.
f Luke x. 1, xxiv. 34; John xxi. 17.

52 FAITH AND THE FAITH
or were ready to frame any creed which
should confess three persons in the Godhead
or even the threefold Name. Because they
believed in God, they believed in His Son;
because they believed in the Father and
the Son, they believed in the Spirit; and
that, as far as we can see, simply as an act
of faith and with no thought of expressing
in a formula their faith of trust and devotion
of insight. Faith preceded what we should
call the Faith. IV
Thus this wonderful faith, inspired by a
life and working out in life, was almost if
not quite apart from any clear thought or
questionings as to the Incarnation or any
suggestion of that which we try to express
when we speak of the three Persons in the
eternal Godhead. It grew up (as we may say)
naturally, as devout men came to learn more
and more about God, to think of all His
works and to have their talking of His
doings, and to honor Him better. It was
really the result of an intuition based on a

FAITH IN GOD 53
personal relationship; it was truth presented
to the soul through faith and apprehended
by willing obedience to the ancient law,
" Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with
all thy heart and with all thy soul and with
all thy mind " ; it came from an insight the
operation of which could not have been dis
cerned by thought and the result of which
could not have been satisfactorily expressed
in words. For faith is always inspired by a
reality, and there can be no faith except in
a living person. And the Hebrew was even
from early times taught to see, in the close
relation in which the God of the covenant
stood to himself, that he himself had been
made in the image of God; and his assurance
of the One-ness, the Unity, of God was not
weakened, but rather increased, by the theo-
phanies in which, under the likeness of some
human or celestial visitant, Jahveh, the Lord,
made Himself known to him. The messenger
Jahveh, " the angel Lord," * was the eternal
One making Himself known; and as His
words and His acts were those of the Most
* First mentioned in Genesis xvi. 7 ; ' the angel of God ' in
Genesis xxi. 17.

54 FAITH AND THE FAITH
High, so as Most High He accepted homage.
He was the Word speaking, the reason in
terpreting, a wondrous revelation or unveil
ing of the real life of the God of Israel.
So was it also, and we are inclined to say,
more readily, with belief in the Spirit of the
Lord. Some personal power, some breath
of life, came to men whose hearts and souls
were prepared, and thoughts were conceived
and expressed which witnessed to a true in
spiration. If in the Old Testament we are
constantly reminded of limited power of
vision and limited capacity for knowledge
and limited gifts of utterance, yet over and
over again we witness acts or listen to utter
ances which seem to belong to a later day
and a clearer revelation. A psalmist sings
as any godjy man might sing in any age, and
suddenly something guides his tongue to a
special acknowledgment of a gift and a glory
which had not been as yet revealed. A
prophet proclaims for his own time the
significance of events or of tendencies with
the declaration of God's reward of blessing
or of judgment, and presently he sees past
all that is immediately involved in the les-

FAITH IN GOD 55
son to which he has begun to give utterance,
and tells of eternal issues, testifying before
hand to the suffering of God's righteous
servant and the glory that shall follow.*
Before Christ came, faith had seen and had
given utterance to this great truth, that in
the Godhead there is fulness of life, that the
Word and the Spirit of God are truly and
essentially divine.
I suggested, a moment ago, that it might
seem to us a more ready thing to learn of
God's Spirit than of His Word, and that we
might expect the distinct revelation of life
to precede that of truth. That it was not
so in the earlier days seems evident from the
writings of historians and prophets; and we
may say that the Hebrew mind was so
moulded that it must have the more con
crete knowledge of God Who lived among
men before it could reach to the knowledge
of God Who lives in men. A little reflection
will, I think, convince us that it was really
so when the great Christian revelation was
made in Jesus Christ and that it is really
so to-day. The Word must tabernacle in us
* I. Peter i. 10.

56 FAITH AND THE FAITH
first, that the Spirit may lead us into truth;
the theology of the Son can be discerned and
expressed, as was done centuries ago, while
we must wait for the theology of the Holy
Spirit perhaps until a new dispensation shall
come. Fully to consider this, however, is
beyond the limit of this argument, if not of
our whole discussion.*
But we may well remind ourselves that
faith, which carried on the love and the
hope of godly men of old, the full efficacy
of which in its pre-Christian power is seen
in the loftiest strain of Hebrew prophecy
and poetry, is pure faith. It does not differ
at all in principle from that by which we
trust and believe ; by means of the same faith
in which we look to find salvation — we may
again remind ourselves from the words of
the Christian prophet — the elders, men of
the ancient covenant, had full witness borne
to them. Faith was the constant habit of
their thought, faith the power of their life,
faith the source for them of a knowledge
which they could scarce begin to express in
words. They thought, they lived, they knew,
* But see Lecture IV. and the end of Professor Scott's article.

FAITH IN GOD 57
by virtue of that which they had learned
from without themselves, but they were
carried on beyond it all by that personal
relation to God which in its results is ex
ceeding abundant above all that we can ask
or think or even know. Their faith taught
them more than they would have confessed,
could they have thought in our terms, to be
for them the Faith. V
Our Creed, and indeed every declaration
of the Catholic faith, contains statements
which the Church deems essential, but of
various kinds. Some we recognize as facts
of natural religion, as that God is and that
He judges in righteousness; some, as facts
of history, as that Jesus Christ was crucified
and rose again from the dead; some, as con
fession of personal experience, as that Christ
is our Lord and that we may obtain forgive
ness of sins; some we may call inferences
of thought, as that God is the Creator;
some have become for us an assurance for
the future, as that there shall be a life
eternal; and for some we fall back upon

58 FAITH AND THE FAITH
what we call faith and faith alone, as that
Jesus Christ is the Son of God, and is now
enthroned in glory. But however we may
for one reason or another classify them, they
all enter into the articles of our belief, our
statement of the Faith; however else we have
gained a knowledge of them, such they have
become for us as we have apprehended their
full significance. Each article, evident as it
may seem if stated historically, profound as
it may seem if expressed in theological terms,
is for us matter of faith; and matter of faith
each was originally, or must necessarily have
become, before it could be placed with others
in such a statement of essentials.
We have yet to consider how the Church
came to certain definitive statements of her
corporate belief; it is perhaps enough for
us to-day if we have found one chief reason
for the Christian acceptance of the Son and
the Spirit as one with the Father in His
eternal Godhead and its glory; that it was,
in effect, in the simple faith of those who
knew and loved and trusted in the God of
the ancient covenant, and to whom there
fore He unveiled somewhat of the deeper

FAITH IN GOD 59
truth of His nature and His life. They
knew that their God was the living and true
God, eternal, of infinite power, wisdom, and
goodness, the maker and preserver of all
things. If there are in the unity of this
Godhead, as necessary to the fulness of life
and of attributes, a Word and a Life, real
existences and really to be manifested, those
holy and humble men of heart must have
seen somewhat of it; if, to reverse the argu
ment, such men in their friendship with God
saw these suggestions of what we call the
doctrine of the Holy Trinity, it must be
that there is a real foundation for that doc
trine. It is involved, as the greatest of
Christian theologians have told us, in the
necessary assertion that the God Whom man
can rightly worship, is and must be living and
true.* Thus did this truth, not yet formally
stated and recognized, come to the souls
of those who knew the God of their fathers
to be their God for ever and ever; thus did
their faith and worship prepare the way for
the acceptance of the Son of God when He
came incarnate into the world, and for the
* afoflcv6ct ' real,' ' very.'

60 FAITH AND THE FAITH
profound meditations and teachings of the
doctors of the Church of Christ.
Only — and this shall be said for what is
to follow as well as for that to which our
thoughts have been now directed — we must
remember that the Faith does not precede
faith; for in fact, and of very necessity, faith
is requisite in its life and growth before aught
can be declared as a part of the faith of the
believer. Our Gloria may depend for form
of words upon the agreement of doctors and
the decrees of councils; but the faith in which
we worship goes back to our knowledge of
God as He has made Himself known and to
the first and great commandment. It is
conceivable that human terms may cease to
express great truths; it is impossible that
which is absolutely true, faith in God, should
lose its verity or its power. This can, I think,
be made to appear still more clearly when
we come to inquire as to our faith in Jesus
Christ as the incarnate Son of God.

LECTURE III
FAITH IN JESUS CHRIST
Acts xvi. 31.
TlioTEvaov em tov Kiiptov 'lyoovv.
" Become a believer upon the Lord Jesus."
We have noted in the lectures which have
preceded that faith is a source of knowledge
and that facts of the highest importance are
brought before our minds by this proof of
things invisible. We have noted also that
the facts thus learned become of necessity
the objects of our thoughts and require to
be stated in words. These words may be
very simple indications of our thoughts and
suggestions of our faith; or they may be the
carefully weighed words in which we try to
express technically the truths which we have
been led to believe. But we should err if
we were to claim that the technical terms
are necessary either for our conviction as to
61

62 FAITH AND THE FAITH
important truth or even for our sufficient
declaration of that conviction. The Hebrews
in their approach to the truth of the three
fold being of God, the early Christians in
their clear acceptance of that truth, did not
need to speak of three Persons in the God
head or of God as existing in Trinity; and
neither of these terms has passed into the
Creed. They serve as symbols to suggest
and certify the great and important truths
to which they apply; and their value, like
that of other symbols, is largely that they
are technical rather than devotional, and that
students of divine truth hold them in their
accepted sense, and thus both profess that
sense and teach it. What has been said as
to the nature and life of God is also ap
plicable to the person and work of Jesus
Christ; and we are to consider to-day our
faith in Him and our expression of that faith
in language.

It has been already suggested that there
are matters, great and small, both of history
and of observation, which we accept as true

FAITH IN JESUS CHRIST 63
and as influencing our lives, though for us
they remain facts of history or of observa
tion, as the case may be. We inquire into
them and about them ; we try to learn exactly
what they mean, how they came about, what
underlies them by way of cause or occasion,
what have been their results, and what in
fluence they have or ought to have upon
ourselves; we draw inferences from them, and
consider them a part of our mental, if not
of our moral, furnishing. Some of them are
a part of the common heritage of mankind,
and as such will never cease to interest and
to instruct civilized men; some of them are
of unceasing value to those who follow out
special lines of study or investigation, such
as lie as the basis of science or of certain of
its applications; while others are, we should
say, our own personal property, each being
an experience or an acquirement of our own,
which affects us in one way or another as it
enters into our life and has a permanent
influence upon it. Thus our characters are
largely moulded, and our lives directed, by
some power which has reached us from with
out, by some person or by what some per-

64 FAITH AND THE FAITH
son has said or done. It should be added,
that there is many an influence working upon
us, the source of which we cannot trace, and
of the very existence of which we may be
ignorant. Of all these, at least as far as we are
conscious of them, we may fairly ask whether
there is discernible in them the working of
faith as bringing knowledge to our mind and
of reason as testing that knowledge and com
mending it to us. The fact of history or of
science, of influence or of attraction, may not
be or have been at bottom outside the range of
sight — that is to say of the bodily or mental
powers, to discern and to report; but when
facts thus learned in themselves become the
objects of thought, the inspiration of desire,
the incitements of will, the teachers of duty,
we are convinced that there is more in them
than belongs to the range of the senses or of
the mind; faith has come to make at least
the beginning of a revelation as to the mean
ing of what has been otherwise in part dis
closed, and faith has called upon reason to
judge of the truth, the reality, of that which
has been thus presented to the soul. Faith

FAITH IN JESUS CHRIST 65
looks at the facts of nature, of history, and
of character; and faith presently reports that
they are not fully known until she brings
them into her light and shows the reality of
their existence and of their meaning. The
mind and the soul of man are, in all mat
ters of any serious importance, guided and
moved by faith.
We have seen a great example of this in
the growth of man's thought of God and
belief in Him: that in some wondrous way
man received the great truth of the Unity
of God; and that without declining from the
influence of this great truth upon him, he
was led to see that in the life of the God
head, the life of the eternal Father, there is
the life of a Word and a Spirit, and almost to
confess that God cannot be fully known save
as Father, Son, and Spirit; and that faith
has thus made ready a way for the Christian
revelation contained in the Triune Name,
before it was clearly taught by the risen
Lord and by the Church to which He com
mitted its promulgation.
Now, our faith in God leads naturally to
our faith in Jesus Christ, the incarnate Son

66 FAITH AND THE FAITH
of God. The steps by which the Apostles
and those whom they taught arrived at that
faith in Him closely resemble those by which
the pious men of Israel in the later days of
the old dispensation arrived at a readiness
to accept faith in the Triune God. The
Word of God, being known as a person,
and as a person revealing the Eternal One,
might readily be thought of as coming to
live among men and to speak with them and
to them; and the Spirit, acknowledged as
having at least personal attributes, might
readily be believed to have a habitation with
men through the Word. There were lines of
faith and hope and longing which led along
this way; and that which they faintly dis
closed was so real that it could not fail, we
should say, to come at the last to a clear reve
lation. Especially, if we acknowledge, as I
think we must, that creation is a revelation
of the Word of God, that the worlds, the
ages, with all progress in things material, are
His, and further that all intellectual and
spiritual existence is dependent on Him —
if we confess the truth of the profound
utterance of the prologue of St. John's Gos-

FAITH IN JESUS CHRIST 67
pel, that in the Word was all life and all
light; then certainly we are ready for that
utterance which is the climax of the prologue,
that the Word became flesh and tabernacled
in us and we beheld His glory. This, we
confess, we might expect; but the great pro
logue could not have been indited until
after the Word was known as incarnate.
,By it we justify our acceptance of this great
truth of revelation; but no saint or prophet
could have written its words until that of
which they thus told had come to pass. The
distinct faith in the Incarnation, in Jesus
Christ as Son of God and Son of man, be
longs to the days of the New Testament.
II '
This faith is emphatically personal; and it
sprang from knowledge of a person and
personal attachment to Him. A man named
Jesus (Joshua, Victorious, Saviour) lived
for a short time among men in the Holy
Land after it had become part of a province
of the Roman Empire. He dwelt quietly
and humbly in a small but fairly busy city
until He was about thirty years old, when

68 FAITH AND THE FAITH
the minds of men were stirred by the re
port that the prophetic power of the Spirit
had returned and that one enthusiastic
prophet was declaring that the kingdom of
heaven was soon to be revealed. Starting,
as it seemed, to follow that prophet, He
was confessed by him to be greater than
himself and the Lamb of God; while pres
ently one of the forerunner's disciples de
clared Him to be the promised Messiah, and
another acknowledged Him as Son of God
and King of Israel. For three years the
wondrous personality of this Man then
showed itself, with its extraordinary power
of attraction and repulsion, in words and
deeds mostly along unexpected ways and
often with unexpected results; and while He
was yet in early manhood, His life came to
a violent and shameful end. A few disciples
had partly understood Him, and they would
have been slow to forget Him; but in those
excited times the petty triumph of His
enemies and the sad disappointment of His
followers might have slipped away into the
forgotten or indifferently remembered past,
had it not been for the rumor and then the

FAITH IN JESUS CHRIST 69
assertion and then the public proclamation
that He was alive, that He had passed on
beyond the power of death, that He was with
God, and that from God He had sent the
full gift of the expected Spirit, Whose power
was manifesting itself in very remarkable
ways. There were many who asked the
question, and many more who were looking
for an answer to the question: Who was, who
is, this teacher and leader of men, Joshua
by name, Messiah by the title which His
followers claim for Him? He certainly was
man; His life of thirty years showed it;
and all that marked humanity belonged to
the lowly boy of rightfully noble parentage,
the studious and godly youth, the artisan
instructed in the busy world of action, the
harmoniously developed Man, who for a
short time was a leader of men in ways of
right and their opponent in wrongful ways;
who suffered, was crucified, died, and was
buried. Certainly He was man; and He
called Himself the Son of Man.
Quite as certainly — His immediate follow
ers and those whom they influenced had
begun to say — He was more than man. The

70 FAITH AND THE FAITH
beauty and balance and perfectness of His
character were beyond what man had ever
shown before; even if His Mother had not
told as yet the story of His conception and
birth, He Himself had said that He had
come forth from the Father and come into
the world; He had affirmed that all things
had been delivered to Him by the Father;
He had made allegiance to Himself to be
the sufficient test of character; He had de
clared that He was to be the Judge of man
kind; He had, as some at least had under
stood Him, claimed a place with Almighty
God; and indeed divine honors and homage
were very soon rendered to Him.*
Was He then man, who had by holiness
found a way to the might and glory of
the Godhead? Was He God, Who had
lived awhile on earth in the likeness of man?
Some, as we know, in early days, did affirm
that He was but man, through Whom to a
greater or a less extent God was revealed;
and some declared that He was all divine,
humanity being but a garb assumed by Him
•John xvi. 28; Matthew xi. 27, xxviii. 18, vii. 22, 23, xvi.
27; Johnv. 19-29.

FAITH IN JESUS CHRIST 71
for a time, or more probably sheer unreality.
Each answer to the great question was
easily framed and speciously proposed, for
each denied or ignored or explained away
the facts which might point to the other.
Each was based on imperfect understanding
or knowledge; neither, as we shall presently
see, was the answer of faith; neither could
be given by one who believed in Jesus the
Christ. Moreover — and this it is of the utmost
importance to note — those who actually knew
the Man Jesus were firm believers that He
was Lord and Christ; and those who first
came to recognize Him as their Divine Lord
bore witness also to the reality of His
humanity. What did Peter think and say
of Him, the Apostle who had made such
strong confession of Him, had seen His glory
in the holy mount, had yet denied Him
in the time of trial, and had been restored
by Him when He accepted his great repent
ance? What was the belief and the testi
mony of that other disciple, who entered
into his Lord's affection, who forsook Him
not at the Cross, and went to the tomb

72 FAITH AND THE FAITH
prepared to believe the resurrection? What
did he say, whom men called His brother,
who had lived with Him from childhood
until both were grown-up men, who shared
with Him the appellation of the Just?
None of them could ever have doubted that
the Lord, as they came to call Him, was
truly man; that which they had heard and
seen and handled made it certain that He
was, in all that goes to make up human
nature, as really human as themselves; but
the wonder of it was that, as they looked
back after the resurrection, they could see
that all the time He had been not merely
revealing God, but revealing Himself as
God. None of those who best could know
denied the humanity, and yet all of them
confessed the deity, of their Master. Neither
Peter nor John nor James explained what
He taught or put it at once in terms of
speech or thought; but from their very being
with Christ they learned through faith,
through personal confidence in Him and per
sonal attachment to Him, who He was. The
chief Apostle on the day of Pentecost and
ever after was ready to undo his denial by

FAITH IN JESUS CHRIST 73
most confident profession that in the glorified
Lord was all life and salvation, that His
sufferings and the glory following could
bring man to God.* The disciple who wrote
of himself as loved by the Master was al
most vehement in his declaration that the
Son of God, Jesus Christ, was with the
Father to be worshipped and glorified, and
was indeed the very source of reality and of
life.t The just one, whom the Lord chose
to care specially for the mother congregation
of His disciples at Jerusalem, who had
known the Lord as man more intimately (we
may assume) than those others, placed his
Brother not with man but with God; he
described himself as " servant of God and
of the Lord Jesus Christ," while another
member of the same household announced
himself as servant of Jesus Christ and
brother of James.J
And as to Saul of Tarsus, whose faith
had not grown by the experiences of youth
and early manhood or even by those of three
*Acts ii. 36; I. Peter iii. 18, 22.
t John i. Iff.; I. John i. Iff.
f James i. 1; Jude 1.

74 FAITH AND THE FAITH
years' close intimacy, but in whom, what
ever the preparation for it, it burst forth in
the strong conviction of a great soul which
has been seeking for the truth and to whom
it is suddenly revealed — the Paul of the
Acts and the Epistles — need we argue Who
Jesus Christ was to his mind, his affections,
his faith? As surely as the Almighty Father
is God, so surely for him Jesus Christ is the
pre-existing Son of God, " over all God
blessed for ever," and in his constant dox-
ologies he anticipates the formularies of the
Church's worship, ascribing glory to the
Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost.*
Such was the early faith of the followers of
Christ; when asked who He is, their souls
replied in faith, though their lips had not
yet learned to confess in exact form of words :
He is the very Son of God, Who came down
from heaven, and took to Himself the nature
of man for man's redemption, and is now
with God. It was following generations,
deficient in faith but anxious to argue, which
framed easier answers and denied, now the
•Romans i. 1-4, ix. 5; I. Corinthians xii. 4-6; Colossians i.
15-18.

FAITH IN JESUS CHRIST 75
humanity and now the deity of Christ, and
now strangely enough both the humanity and
the deity.
It would take us too far astray if we
should attempt to follow, even in outline,
the argumentative questions and controversies
which troubled the Church for so long a
time. It is enough to recall (1) that there
was a period of simple faith which preceded
those years of controversy; (2) that there
was a strong and quiet faith which kept the
undercurrent of the Church's belief and
practice simple and pure; and (8) that when
the Church came to herself it was to find
that she had tested her God-inspired faith
by her God-bestowed power of reason and
had found that it could endure the test.
For what were the facts, belonging to the
unseen, really facts though they could not be
proved by the evidence of the senses, facts
that came from the knowledge of person by
person, a personal attraction on the one hand
and a personal allegiance on the other? Men
found a Man Who moved within them a
knowledge of Himself, nay rather, as on the
very morrow of the baptism, men knew that

76 FAITH AND THE FAITH
a Man had found them and had quickened
in their souls faith in Himself.* They knew
that He was man; they soon discerned that
in some wondrous way, as He touched them,
so He was touched by God or even " pro
ceeded forth and came from God." If they
did not readily grasp the truth of His pre-
existence with God (n-p6s rov ®eov), He pres
ently suggested it to them and it scarce
startled them, so natural did it seem; they
had faith in Him as divine. Practically then,
faith taught them that He Whom they had
called Jesus and acknowledged as Christ was
the Son of God; that He had been born
into the world of man in order that the
promises might be fulfilled, and that man
by His sufferings and victory might attain
a new life. They had faith — for now we
may without hesitation use the formal lan
guage of the age of the Councils — that the
Son of God, a Person with the divine nature,
had taken to Himself human nature, and
that thus He was one Christ, very God and
very Man. Of course, the simple faith found
a simple expression; what we call the Faith
* John i. 35-51.

FAITH IN JESUS CHRIST 77
did not come to the intellect in definition till
long after faith in its truth had entered into
the souls of believers and been accepted by
them. Those prepared souls, of whom we
have spoken before, who were waiting for
the outpouring of the Spirit and the day of
redemption, prepared to sing the Benedictus,
who almost had a clear revelation of the
Word, were prepared to accept the truth
of the Incarnation when in the fulness of the
times God should send forth His Son. No
great truth has ever come to an unprepared
world; certainly this great revelation could
not so come. The spiritual fact or act called
forth faith, and faith recognizing the great
reality accepted it and held it fast. St. John
did not for the first time when he indited his
great Epistle say, " We know that the Son
of God is come " ; he knew better indeed than
at the first what that knowledge meant; but
we may doubt whether the fathers of Nicsea
or of Chalcedon or the pious scholars of
later days knew it more surely or with more
full comprehension than did he. For the
faith, when it needs to be put into words, is
but the expression, the finite expression, of

78 FAITH AND THE FAITH
faith which is indefinable (that is, infinite),
but which is both real and strong.
Ill
Such was the faith of our Lord's first
disciples, faith in Him, real and strong, but
as yet not clearly defined either in thought
or in expression. They knew Him, they were
drawn to Him, they put their full trust in
Him, they believed in Him. And this was
the Lord's demand which He made of those
who heard Him and would become His dis
ciples. With His great humility there was
always joined the call to men and women
and children to come to Him, not only that
they might hear and obey Him, but also that
they might give themselves to Him and test
themselves by their relation to Him. The
Sermon on the Mount does not belong, we
now think, to a very early place in our Lord's
ministry, though it stands early in the narra
tive of St. Matthew's Gospel; but its teach
ing is equally wonderful, whether it was
spoken a few months or two years after His
baptism. And its chief lesson, I venture to
say, is not so much in the Beatitudes or in

FAITH IN JESUS CHRIST 79
the expansion of the ancient Law or in the
inculcation of moral duties, as in the sense
of want which it first produces and in the
declaration that the supply of that want could
be found in the Speaker Himself. The Ser
mon is first a conviction of ignorance and
weakness and sin; but at the close the
Speaker declares Himself to be the Judge of
men, Whose approbation is for them the
measure of success, and Who is Himself the
foundation on which all lasting character
must be built.* Those who listened to His
words and thought upon them were aware,
not only of the authority by which He ex
panded or corrected that which had been
said to men of old time, but also of the con
fident dignity with which He bade men find
a new inspiration in their acquaintance with
Himself. And in faith men heard and
yielded to His call and accepted Him, and
made themselves ready for some greater ven
ture of faith and obedience as He should re
quire it of their hearts and hands.
This revelation of Himself as man, yet
beyond man, was in a way summed up in
• Matthew vii. 21-27.

80 FAITH AND THE FAITH
our Lord's calling Himself the Son of Man.*
In what way exactly the title was drawn
from earlier prophetic and apocalyptic use,
we may not stop to inquire ; but in the record
of Daniel's visions, with which the men of
our Lord's time were certainly familiar, the
Son of Man was revealed with the Ancient of
Days, being brought near to Him and receiv
ing from Him glory and honor and dominion.t
And though it need not have signified the
divine nature in Him to Whom the title was
given, it did mean that He was in that rela
tion to God which belonged to the archetypal
man, to one who at least represented man
before God and God before man. The word
was a test of faith, and the understanding
and use of it was an act of faith; for through
Him as made known by this lofty title was
the sure approach to Him as the Son of
God. This name and this faith are recorded in
the Gospels. We gather from the form of
Christ's great challenge and St. Peter's an
swer, that — if we may venture thus to ex
press ourselves — the Lord asked with anxiety
•First in Mark ii. 10. f Daniel vii. 13.

FAITH IN JESUS CHRIST 81
as to what the reply would be, and the
Apostle answered as having been forced by
the question to decide what he did in reality
believe. " If men call Me a prophet of the
olden time, Who do ye say that I am?
Do ye say as much as they, or can ye say
as much?" "Surely, we must answer; we
make the bold confession; it is in our hearts,
though we did not know it: Thou art the
Messiah; nay, Thou art the Son of the living
God." And then the Lord's acceptance of
the confession is not only an expression of
relief; it is a declaration of the power of
truth revealed to faith and acknowledged by
faith: "Blessed art thou, Simon; thou hast
been granted a revelation from My Father "
— thus He accepts the name of Son — " and
thou hast received it." * Thus to this faith
the Apostle, for himself and for the rest,
was committed; from it they swerved, indeed,
but it never quite lost hojd on them, and in
the after years it opened into the words on
which the confession of the Church has been
framed. All was implicit in the simple trust
of those who could not but follow and be-
• Matthew xvi. 13 ff.

82 FAITH AND THE FAITH
lieve in Jesus of Nazareth when they saw
Him and He called them.
IV
Devout men, we have seen, were expecting
a redeeming Messiah Who was to come when
the Spirit should again be poured out upon
God's people from on high. The prophetic
Spirit had returned in the preaching of John
Baptist and the hymns of Zacharias the priest
and Mary the virgin. To them, while wait
ing for the Christ, there came the Son of God.
How soon, we may ask, and how readily, did
they connect these terms, and see that the
Anointed one must be in some true sense
divine? St. John's interpretive record puts on
the lips of one disciple at the very moment of
his call the words, " Rabbi, Thou art the Son
of God, Thou art the King of Israel " ; * and
it also makes the Lord's first distinct assertion
of His Messiahship to have been to the
Samaritan woman whom He met at Jacob's
well, and the formal acknowledgment of it
to have been from the men of her city. " I
know," said she, " that Messiah cometh " ;
• John i. 49.

FAITH IN JESUS CHRIST 83
and the Lord answered, " I Who speak unto
thee am He." And within a few days the
people of Sychar said, " We know that this
is truly the Saviour of the world." * Was it
given to the Apostle to know in after years
the full meaning of thoughts which were im
perfectly expressed at the time, and to put
that full meaning into the words of his narra
tive? Or did some tell him, a few years
later, when he went with Peter to lay his
hands upon those in the city of Samaria
who had been converted at the preaching of
Philip t — did perhaps this very woman and
some of these very men tell him, how their
hearts had been stirred at the presence and
by the words of the Jewish Rabbi Who con
descended to talk with them and to visit
them? And did He then interpret in the
words of His Gospel the meaning of their
thoughts and of the faith which then had its
beginning? Or is this an example of the
unexpected ways in which Christ wrought
and spoke, so often doing what we should
not have expected Him to do, and speaking
in words which we were not prepared to
•John iv. 25, 26, 42. tActs v"1- 14-

84 FAITH AND THE FAITH
hear from His lips? We know not; the
world, Jewish and Samaritan and Gentile,
was strangely moved at that time by the
Spirit Whose comings and goings man can
not determine or understand; and there may
be a lesson for us, as we learn of divine
guidance into truth bestowed upon some with
whom we should not expect to find it, and
read of a revelation made and received in
Samaria which was not given as yet in Judaea;
even as we may wonder that the Apostles'
confession was not made in the courts of
the temple and within the Holy City, but
in the almost heathen region of the Caesarea
of Philip.
But put all these words of faith together;
think of the many other movings of faith
which there must have been among those who
heard and saw the Lord; consider what
underlay the preparedness of thousands to
confess Christ when His resurrection was
preached in the power of the Spirit coming
as His Spirit; and you will see what all that
beginning faith meant. Allow all that you
must for their imperfect apprehension of
what was brought to their minds or even of

FAITH IN JESUS CHRIST 85
what they said; grant, as you must, that
their conception of Messiahship and divine
Sonship was inadequate and inconsistent; yet
in New Testament days men did arrive at
the assurance with which St. John closed his
Epistle, " We know that the Son of God is
come," and even at the stupendous confession
with which he prefaced his Gospel, " The
Word Who tabernacled among us was God,"
®e6s r/v 6 Xoyos* This was faith anticipating
the Faith, the Gospel-faith anticipating — yes,
already moulding — the Nicene and Chalce-
donian theology; the great truths acknowl
edged before they could be expressed, and
influencing men who could not have made at
the time a careful statement of them. Men
believed in Jesus Christ, Son of God and Son
of Man, Who for their sakes came down
from heaven, gained the great victory, and
became Lord over all things. It was a most
wonderful and a most natural faith; and
years after, fully tested by reason and by ex
perience, it was framed in words that the
wise might defend what the simple-hearted
knew and the Church might teach clearly and
•I. Johnv. 20; John i. 1, 14.

86 FAITH AND THE FAITH
boldly that which had been revealed and en
trusted to her as truth. V
We do well to note, I think, that as the
Gospels, in their teaching about Christ, pre
pare the way for the Epistles, so the Johan-
nine and Pauline theology prepares the way
for the Councils. But here also it is faith
preparing the way for the Faith, the Church's
Creeds. Arriving at faith in Christ along
different paths, with minds differently
constituted for recognizing and holding
truth, with souls trained by widely differ
ing experiences, St. Paul and St. John
had equally strong faith in Jesus Christ,
the Son of God, the Redeemer of mankind.
The one Apostle saw in faith man's hand
stretched out to receive God's forgiving
grace, and he insisted on the doctrine of
justification; the other found in it rather the
gift of the life of God to man, and he dwelt
on its victorious power; but both were con
scious of the great truths as to Christ, His
divine Person in its relation to the Father,
His human nature taking hold of ours and

FAITH IN JESUS CHRIST 87
by ours received. That personal relationship
to Him which faith connotes, each had gained
and could not lose; that knowledge of Him
which cannot be told, each had experienced.
It was not in the same way that all who be
lieved in the Father came to believe also in
the Son and in the Spirit; yet the disciples
of all Christian teachers were learning truths
which brought them finally to acknowledge
the glory of the eternal Trinity. It was not
in the same way that all who believed in
Jesus Christ came to confess Him as the Son
of God incarnate, the Word made flesh, yet
they all were brought to the same acknowl
edgment that He was in unity of Person
perfect God and perfect Man. By the guid
ance of the Spirit, man's loftiest faculty of
reason tested that which faith had learned
and submitted to it; and affirming its truth,
it bore witness also to its value, both abso
lutely and in its due proportion (dvaXoyla,
as St. Paul calls it). And thus when for
mulas were needed, reason threw faith upon
itself, and bade men say of the great truths
thus doubly witnessed, " I believe." But
before the formula came faith, sure yet unde-

88 FAITH AND THE FAITH
fined; and before the formula came also in a
sense the Faith, confessed before controversy
had made it necessary to guard rigidly the
meanings of words. The simple faith of
those who know the Saviour Whom they have
believed has always been their salvation and
their life ; and to it the words of wise scholars
and theologians should lead us back.
Of those statements, as necessarily as care
fully framed, let us not speak in any depre
ciatory tone. They were framed by men
whose duty it was to state in clearest terms
the truths presented to the soul by faith and
corroborated by Scripture, that they might
guide the uninstructed and support the weak
and guard those whom the enemies of truth
might lead astray. They were cast in words
of the Greek language, the nearest perfec
tion in man's means of expression as well of
philosophical as of poetic truth; and the
whole Christian world for centuries has
known their meaning and has consented to it.
If at any time they shall need to be recast,
it will be because words have utterly changed
their meaning, or because thought has taken
quite new moulds of expression, or because

FAITH IN JESUS CHRIST 89
the centre of influence has so changed that
a language of quite another type is needed
for the scholarly and thoughtful Christian
world. This will not happen in our day;
but perhaps we ought to be considering how
far we should insist on the reception of our
formularies, European in form with a Semitic
background, upon races whose language and
philosophic thought are utterly different from
ours. We cannot carry them the Gospel as
if it had just come into the world; we are
responsible for what we have learned since
the first century as well as for what we have
received from the Apostolic Church; but the
time may come when we must study well
the acceptable and persuasive mould of
Christian truth, that it may prove itself to
be the power and the wisdom of God to
nations of a far different type from our
own. Perhaps that problem is nearer us
than we think.*

But the truth for all ages and for all
peoples is the same. And faith for all ages
* See a suggestive article on The "Western Form of Chris
tianity in The East and the West, April, 1913.

90 FAITH AND THE FAITH
and for all peoples is the same. There is
one living and true God, in the unity of
Whose Godhead there are with the Father
His Son and His life-giving Spirit; there
is one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son incarnate,
the Redeemer of men. The relation of our
souls to our God and Saviour is such that
we know Him by faith, and trusting Him
enter into His very life and live by it. And
this personal relation may grow stronger and
stronger and be the sole moving power of
our spiritual and moral and intellectual life,
in the vigor of which life we shall find the
fulness of victorious salvation. Believe in
God; believe in the Lord Jesus Christ; be
lieve in God's Holy Spirit; thus shall faith
make us strong, because our lives shall be
lives of faith.

LECTURE IV
FAITH IN THE SPffilT
I. Corinthians xii. 3.
Ovdelc Sbvarai elirclv Kvpioc 'Iqoovc el ft?) iv irvev/ian ayiu.
" No one can say Lord Jesus except in Holy Spirit."
To complete our study of Faith in God,
Who is its one great source and object, we
need to turn our thoughts to the Holy
Spirit. He, in the true sense of the word
' spirit,' is the life of God as it shows itself
and acts and is appropriated in the soul of
man. He, also, because the life which He is
and imparts is divine, is the great principle
and revelation of order in the universe and
in the world of man. His working combines
both freedom and law; its results are beauty
and strength. " Glory and worship are with
Him, power and honor are in His every
sanctuary." The religious man must have
faith in the Holy Spirit, must use His
power, must learn truth from Him, for
91

92 FAITH AND THE FAITH
" He searcheth out all things, even the depths
divine."

The revelation of God's Spirit, as we have
seen, began to be made in the early days.
We may not readily distinguish — and we
may well believe that the early writers did
not intend to distinguish — between the breath
of God which brooded over the waters at the
world's beginning, which breathing upon
man at the beginning of his conscious life
as man made him living soul, which spoke
in the thoughts and by the words of pro
phetic men, and the Spirit recognized (at
least imperfectly) as a person with powers
of instruction and persuasion and revelation.
Even for us the distinction is not always
clear in the writings of the Apostles and
saints of the Church and in our deepest
meditation on the things of God; and in the
olden times it sufficed that men recognized
the voice of God as speaking to them and
His life as shaping their lives. " Take not
thy Holy Spirit from me";* we should be
• Psalm li. 11.

FAITH IN THE SPIRIT 93
hardly surprised to find these words assigned
to some pious patriarch under the earliest
covenant, and their occurrence in the Miserere
can hardly help us to assign that Psalm to
any period or date. We cannot say what
any penitent of Old Testament times must
have meant when he prayed that God would
not take away from him His holy breath or
His holy life, but it would mean at least that
the sinner, turning from his sin, was praying
that God would not drive him away from the
only source of life and light — " Cast me not
away from Thy presence " is, as you will
remember, the parallel to these words — and
thus deprive him of strength.
But certainly, as we read the later writings
of the old covenant, we do find that to the
Spirit of God are attributed qualities which
we cannot but call personal. Guided by
prophecy, and quickened by the lively and
almost tense expectation which marked the
elect in the days that ushered in the advent
of the incarnate Son of God, the hope of
earlier times became the assurance of those
who were waiting for the light of the day-
spring from on high. They were ready — it,

94 FAITH AND THE FAITH
is not too much to say it — for the coming of
the Son and of the Spirit of God, that there
might be a full revelation of the eternal God
head. I will not pause to remind you again
of that which I suggested in an earlier lec
ture, that on the first pages of the Gospel
we read of the work of the Holy Spirit, no
preparation being made for the announce
ment of His appearance such as is made for
the proclamation of the coming of the Son
of God; and that, alike in the words of the
narrative and in those which enshrine the
teaching of our Lord, we find mention of the
Spirit and of His work. The Spirit testifies
to Him from His conception to the end of
His ministry; one of the Lord's greatest
utterances after His resurrection is that in
which He bade His disciples to " take Holy
Spirit," while the other is the inclusion of
the Holy Spirit with the Father and the
Son in the revelation of that Name of God
whereby He was to be known in the
Church until the consummation of the pres
ent age.*
As we pass to the book of the Acts of
• John xx. 23 ; Matthew xxviii. 19.

FAITH IN THE SPIRIT 95
the Apostles, how can this be better de
scribed than as the Gospel of the Spirit?
For from the day of Pentecost on which
His gifts were poured out upon the Church
until the day when at Rome the new Apostle
exhorting the Jews quoted the words which
He, the Spirit, spake by a prophet to the
fathers of old time,* the book is concerned
with the bestowal of the Spirit, His mani
fold gifts, and the divine ways in which those
who had them were trained to use them to
the honor of the one Lord of all men whom
He called into His Church. In fact, the
working and the work of the Spirit is so
constantly assumed as lying beneath all that
is purposed and done, the manifestation of
His power is so constant wherever the Gospel
is preached, and His approval is in such
wise made the sole test of the right accom
plishment of duty, new duty called forth
in new ways, that it needs no argument to
prove the place of the Holy Spirit in the
theory and the actuality of the true life of
men. And as His work stands out evidently
in all that is done and is taught, so it begins
* Acts ii. 4, xxviii. 25.

96 FAITH AND THE FAITH
to be shown to be absolutely necessary for
the accomplishment of a plan which had been
hidden from ages and from generations but
now had been made manifest to God's
saints.* Here, too, we must note — though it will
be impossible to consider so great a matter in
any detail — that the Spirit's work is, from
the beginning of the new dispensation, de
scribed as done in the Body, one as the Spirit
is one, which is the Church. In the new crea
tion, as in the old, God breathed upon that
which He had prepared and it became soul
of life, and the Church was born into the
vigor of youth which has since been and
rightly is hers. The Body henceforth lives
because of the Spirit, and the Spirit inspires
life and guides action because it works in the
Body. Studying God's purposes from that
which He does, we cannot doubt the fact
of the Spirit's action nor yet the neces
sity that He shall act. And this was rever
ently studied and assuredly known from the
beginning.
* Colossians i. 26; Ephesians iii. 4-6; Acts xv. 14 ff.

FAITH IN THE SPIRIT 97
II
The age of the Church is, then, the dis
pensation of the Spirit, His oiKovo^ia, the
administration in which His working is
especially made known. However we may
interpret the words of St. John in his Gos
pel, " Holy Spirit was not yet, because not
yet was Jesus glorified," * it is quite certain
that in the days which followed Pentecost,
when the glorified Lord had received and
sent the promise of the Father, Holy Spirit
had become a living and working presence
in the Church. Both in words and in works
the Apostles showed the power and proved
the life of their Master by that which His
Spirit inspired. Can we wonder that they
expected to see signs wrought through Him?
that, realizing that they had entered upon a
new age, they were looking for the powers
of that coming world? that they were not
startled even at an exuberance of revela
tions, of spiritual gifts, xaPiffMara of a higher
order than had been known before? or again
that they saw wonders where we of later days
• John vii. 39.

98 FAITH AND THE FAITH
can discern but a normal and wonted method
of God's goodness and power? Assuredly
there were miracles and wonders then; with
great power did the Apostles give witness
of the resurrection of the Lord Jesus,
faith was mighty, and its every exercise
was wonderful, and everything wonderful
was a proof of the new life. We can
not readily imagine the conditions of the
Church in Jerusalem, when the influence and
perhaps even the exercise of that first out
pouring of the Spirit had not passed away,
that day when pious men from all parts of
the world caught from otherwise wild utter
ances something which brought to their
understanding, as they said " in their own
tongues," the wonderful works of God.
Soon in a quieter way the Apostles taught
the glorified Christ and the present Spirit to
the throngs who gathered in the great clois
ters of the temple; yet those simple men
were clad with wonderful dignity, so that
even their followers did not dare to join
themselves to them, while the crowd treated
them with special honor.* If at even they
•Acts ii. 11, iv. 33, v. 12-14.

FAITH IN THE SPIRIT 99
were put under guard in a prison, they were
found in the morning teaching in the very
place where they had been arrested; and
all the account they could give was that a
messenger of the Lord had opened the doors
and sent them to continue the delivery of
their message.* If a young attendant or
dained to be their helper was seized and
charged with blasphemy, he spoke in his own
defense with the keenness and learning of
a great scholar, and with the courage of a
tried hero he looked beyond the present dan
ger, his face shining with righteous anger
and the strength of truth, until in the shower
of stones he fell asleep, and the greatest
sowing of the seed of the Church's truth was
in the shedding of the blood of that first
martyr.t If the strongest man whom the
Sanhedrin could furnish, in learning and
zeal and hate, was sent forth against the
increasing body of believers, something which
he saw with the eyes of body or of soul or
of both, prostrated and blinded and converted
him.t Thus, in ways which became quieter
indeed, but remained mighty, the plans of
* Acts iv. f Acts vi., vii. $ Acts ix.

100 FAITH AND THE FAITH
the Apostles were shaped and guided. Some
thing — some one — told them where to go and
what to do, whence to turn away and from
what to refrain, some one quieted their con
troversies and guided them with wisdom so
that they could say in the one formal de
cision which they made, " It seemed good to
the Holy Spirit and to us." * The Spirit,
Who began with the manifestation of life and
of life's freedom, passed on to show Him
self the source of order and of discipline.
The Epistles bear a like testimony as they
show how this proof of the Spirit's presence
was seen, and how He held the balance, if we
may so say, between the excitement of the be
ginning and the regularity of later days.
When St. Paul wrote to the Church of God
at Corinth — almost a contradiction in terms,
as one has said — it was to men filled with
the unregulated enthusiasm of the conscious
ness of a new power working among them
and through them; and we may well admire
the judgment and patience with which he
quieted them, without denying the truth or
the value of the strange manifestations of a
* Acts xv. 28.

FAITH IN THE SPIRIT 101
divine presence and activity among them.*
That he claimed that he himself had done
wonderful things at Corinth and elsewhere
is evident; nay, he even affirmed that he had
a greater power of speaking with tongues
than all the rest.t But his plea is for order;
and it is noticeable, by the way, that he cen
tres it on the fact that God had set some in
station and governance in the Church, that
confusion might be avoided and that peace
might ensue.! Pass to the Epistle to the
Ephesians, and you will see how in the city
in which the Apostle's presence not many
years before had excited a riot, there was a
hearing for a quiet but profound study of
the work of God's Spirit, and note again that
the centre of quiet and unity is the order of
the Church's administration^ It all seems
to us a strange world, that in which Chris
tians lived then, in which those early prob
lems were met and for all needed intents
solved; but it was a world in which the Spirit
of God made Himself known. Believers in
* I. Corinthians xii., xiv.
1 1. Corinthians xiv. 18; II. Corinthians xii. 12.
% I. Corinthians xii. 28-31. § Ephesians iv.

102 FAITH AND THE FAITH
God when they came to believe also in Jesus
Christ His Son knew and felt and used the
power of His Holy Spirit. They evidently
had faith in the Spirit, and they must have
felt that their faith in God was not complete
without the recognition of His Spirit; but
of this faith we find as yet no clear confession.
Ill
In the light of what we have thus far
gathered from the New Testament, we may
certainly say that the faith of the early
Christians came from the Holy Spirit and
that they had faith in Him.
1. Their faith was a gift of the Spirit —
not their faith in Him alone, but all their
faith, their trust in God, their allegiance to
Him, their knowledge of Him and of the
world unseen. It startles us a little to see
how St. Paul, in a passage to which reference
has just been made, enumerates the gifts — the
xaptapara — of the Spirit.* He is trying to
quiet a controversy which centred on the
question whether prophecy or speaking with
tongues was the greater and more useful
• I. Corinthians xii. 1 ff.

FAITH IN THE SPIRIT 103
gift; whether, to use words of a modern
meaning, preaching with a view to instruction
and edification, or ecstatic utterance witness
ing to special inspiration and fitted to attract
attention, was worth the more in the Church.
His first answer is in brief, that all gifts are
valuable because they come from the Holy
Spirit, and that we cannot say that in itself
any one is better than another, because they
all have the same source. But see how he
proceeds to enumerate them. " To one," says
he, " is given through the Spirit a word of
wisdom; to another, a word of knowledge ac
cording to the same Spirit; to one of different
kind, faith in the same Spirit; and to another
gifts of healings, in the one Spirit"; and
then he passes on to other gifts somewhat
resembling healings, all having what we might
call a distinctly miraculous character. The
order and the stress are certainly remarkable.
First are named wisdom and knowledge, two
great and fundamental gifts which ought not
to have escaped the minds of the contestants;
each side would probably assert that it had
both, and neither would claim knowledge
for itself and leave wisdom for the other.

104 FAITH AND THE FAITH
But before any other gift or manifestation
of the Spirit the Apostle puts faith. It is
as if he said: You contend about things which
are in themselves but externals; you have
forgotten the weightier matters which are
within and give value to the rest; the Spirit
is the source of wisdom, the apprehension of
reality and of knowledge, the recognition of
facts; and what is real and what is true can
be known only by a power of insight which
belongs to those who trust in God and be
lieve Him; and this trust and belief are dis
tinctly the work of God's Spirit. Thus he
reminded them of the place of faith as being
preliminary to such gifts as miracles or
speaking with tongues or even prophecy, and
of the great truth that faith is the Spirit's
gift. But go back a little and read how St. Paul
proposed a test of so-called spiritual gifts,
and on what he makes the question of their
reality to depend.* It is the same test, we
may note, as that which St. John furnishes
when he charges his disciples that they should
not believe every spirit but try the spirits
* I. Corinthians xii. 3.

FAITH IN THE SPIRIT 105
whether they are of God, and try them by
their acknowledgment or denial that Jesus
Christ is come in the flesh.* Even so St.
Paul, beginning to write as to spiritual things,
tells his disciples that no one when he is
speaking in God's Spirit saith, " Accursed is
Jesus," and that no one can say " Lord
Jesus " except in Holy Spirit. And having
made this assertion so emphatically, he passes
on to speak of the differences of gifts, of
ministrations, of workings, while there is but
one Spirit, one Lord, and one God. The
essential things, he argues, that in which all
xapia/xara or gifts of grace must agree, be
cause it is a prerequisite to them all, is the
profession of belief in Jesus Christ as the
Lord of souls, as the Lord of each one to
whom in any way the Spirit comes or can
come. And still more emphatically, if pos
sible, he declares that for this profession so
simple in words, so simple because so funda
mental in the heart's conviction, there is
needed the power of the Holy Spirit. It is
in reality no little thing, simple though its
form and utterance may be, that any man
• I. John iv. 1-3.

106 FAITH AND THE FAITH
can make the great confession, Jesus is Lord.
For it speaks of faith in its every sense, trust
and allegiance and knowledge, and the Spirit
is thus declared the Spirit of faith.
2. With this recognition of the Holy
Spirit as distinctively the Spirit of faith, we
also read in the New Testament the proof
that the Christians of early times had faith
in the Spirit. They knew Him — or rather
they came to know Him — as a person, and
they wrote of Him as a person, even when
so to write involved a solecism. " When
He, the Spirit of truth, is come," * so St.
John records the Lord's words, using the
masculine pronoun though the word for
' spirit ' is grammatically of neuter gender,
enelvos to nvevpia, " He the Spirit," and he
passes on to describe His work as that of a
person : " He shall lead you along the way
in (or into) the whole range of truth." In
like manner we read, naturally but emphatic
ally, in the Acts and in the Epistles; He
speaks, He bears witness, He stands in a
personal relation to those who believe in Him
and through Him in God; He is the source
• John xvi. 13.

FAITH IN THE SPIRIT 107
of truth, of life, of order; He effects the
presence of the Father and the Son with
men; He is the life of the Church; He
maketh intercession for us; He searcheth out
the depths of God; in His sevenfold glory
and power He stands before the throne in
heaven; and with the Church He calls to
the Lord to come for the completion of His
work.* All this is a witness to the disciples'
faith in Him; and therewithal it is a wit
ness to His widely extended influence; for
He in Whom men could believe was work
ing mightily in men. It was to impart Him
that Apostles laid hands upon those who had
been baptized into the name of the Lord
Jesus or into that triune name in which the
Son and the Spirit were united with the
eternal Father as one God; and witness was
borne to His coming and His abiding, now
by signs and wonders, now by the sacra
ments and ordinances of the Church, and
now by their quiet fruits as shown in love
and longsuffering and fidelity. Surely in
those early days it was reasonable, it was
• Revelation i. 4, xxii. 14.

108 FAITH AND THE FAITH
necessary, that those who accepted God as
revealed in and by Christ should believe the
Spirit, should believe in Him, should ac
knowledge that all the life of their soul was
His; the Spirit ever bore witness with their
spirit that they were God's sons, and this
witness was the mighty energy of their lives.
IV
In contrast with this, faith in the Spirit as
felt and confessed in earliest days and knowl
edge of the Spirit as the only source of
the soul's life, we find that in the declara
tion and definition of what came to be known
as the Faith there is but little said at the
first as to the Holy Spirit's place in the
ceconomy of salvation. More than once in
deed, as we have seen, He is named with
the Father and the Son in such wise as to
show that together with them He was wor
shipped and glorified, but in the earliest
creeds, which made confession of the Son's
relation to the Father and to us — " God's
only Son, our Lord," — we find no more said
of the Holy Spirit than the simple declara
tion of faith in Him. And if presently in

FAITH IN THE SPIRIT 109
the West we find the confession of the Holy
Church or of forgiveness of sins in the Holy
Church, it is (I venture to think) more as
making a fourth division of the creed than
as adding to it a statement of the method
of the Spirit's working. Doubtless the
thought was then, that in the Church the
Spirit dwells and is made known and that
His presence brings forgiveness and expels
sin, but it would seem that the West was
content for a while to say of Him as did the
East, " And in the Holy Spirit."
This, if we may trust our records, was
all that even the Fathers at Nicaea thought
it needful to say of the Spirit when they
simplified and guarded the words of their
former confession as to the Son of God,
Jesus Christ our Lord. We so wonder at
the baldness and abruptness of the third
part of their notable Creed, that possibly
we may be allowed to wonder if they did not
mean to imply that it was unnecessary to
modify the form in which the former creeds
had closed. It would not be quite correct
to say that when the council of Nicaea assem
bled there had been no controversy as to the

110 FAITH AND THE FAITH
Holy Spirit; but certainly there had been
no serious questioning as to the Spirit which
was not involved in the discussions as to the
Son; and it may be that the council, know
ing that the faith of the earlier days was
still held in this regard, while framing a form
of words which should be used everywhere
when men spoke of the Son, left it to each
" particular " Church to speak of the Spirit
as it was wont or as it judged needful.
Scholars are generally in agreement now that
the addition to the creed of Nicaea affirmed
at Chalcedon came not from Constantinople
but from Jerusalem, mother and mistress of
all the churches. Thus we seem to hear from
the lips of the catechist-bishop of the mother-
city what he taught concerning the Spirit,
that He was Lord and Lifegiver, that His
procession was from the Father Who alone is
avroSeos, that with Father and Son He was
to be honored and glorified, that He was
revealed in the earlier days as the prophets
spoke by His inspiration. And, after the
few words of the West which remained
unamplified and after the expanded formula
of the East, both branches of the Church

FAITH IN THE SPIRIT 111
were guided to add, as to the Spirit's work
ing, articles which speak of the Church, of
the restoration which is affected in it by for
giveness, and of that which remains for man
redeemed and forgiven and sanctified — resur
rection of the flesh and the life of a coming
age. They passed from the Spirit, only men
tioned or mentioned with a declaration of
His relation to men and to the Father, to tell
of His great works as objects of faith for
this world and the next. Faith in the Spirit
both preceded and extended far beyond the
Faith in which men spoke of Him, even as
they were guided by Him to believe and to
make confession.
We may see a reason for this when we
consider that, while we believe the Holy
Spirit and believe in Him, He is not as yet
fully revealed; the revelation of Him is still
in the making, especially as His manifoldly
variegated work * is shown in the complicated
history of the Church and in His conflict for
righteousness under the most adverse condi
tions. It has been said that the Church of
England is lamentably deficient in works on
• woXmroiiufoc may be applied here as in Ephesians i. 10.

112 FAITH AND THE FAITH
the theology of the Spirit, there being until
lately almost no work of value on this great
subject later than Bishop Heber's Bampton
Lectures.* The reproach, if it should be so
called, has been in part removed by Professor
Swete's scholarly and devout work in which,
by way of prolegomena, he had examined and
commented on every passage in the New
Testament in which the Spirit is mentioned,
and which he has followed by another volume
on the teaching of the early Church on this
matter.t But really the Church, as these
volumes show, was not ready at the first, and
it is not ready now, to state definitely all
that she would wish to state as to the third
Person of the Trinity and His work in the
oeconomy of this dispensation. Men in patri
archal and prophetic days came to know
God, and then the Son revealed Him and
He was confessed as Father; in the Incarna
tion men learned to know the Son Who
taught the theology of the Father, and then
the Spirit revealed Him as Jesus Christ and
* The Personality and Office of the Christian Comforter,
1835. f The Holy Spirit in the Old Testament; The Holy Spirit in
the Early Church.

FAITH IN THE SPIRIT 113
guided the phraseology of the Church as
she learned how He might be rightly con
fessed; now we are coming to know the
Spirit, and we may be bidden to look for
ward to a time when, as to the theological
confession, " God shall reveal even this "
unto us.* It is not the English Church
alone which cannot yet in complete form
of words confess the Spirit ; the great historic
Churches of East and West do not agree as
to the form of words in which they may
rightly state His relation to the Father and
the Son; devout and wise scholars are sure
that in faith they agree, and we cannot lay
too great stress on this; but the one declares
that it can say no more than that He pro-
ceedeth from the Father and the other does
not dare to say less than that He proceedeth
from the Father and the Son; while neither
can tell us clearly what is meant by ' pro
ceedeth,' though both agree in the second
part of the Creed as to the meaning, or at
least the symbolism, of ' begotten.' It would
• See especially at the end of Professor Scott's article on
The Trinity in the additional (fifth) volume of Hastings's
Dictionary of the Bible, to the opening words of which refer
ence has been made on an earlier page.

114 FAITH AND THE FAITH
seem that for a long time yet — at least until
some great change shall come — our theology
must wait in this matter upon faith.*
And even as to this, is our faith in the
Spirit of God as well defined and as strong
as is our faith in the Father and the Son?
Doubtless, whence we force our minds to
think and our hearts to worship, we make no
distinction, but say the third phrase of our
Gloria with the same earnestness and sense
of reality and devotion as its opening words;
but we do not quite readily think of the
Spirit as a person, a person with Whom we
have relations, a person Whom we love and
in Whom .we can confide and to Whom we
go for comfort and grace; we need to watch
ourselves lest in speaking or writing of Him
we say ' it,' as if His personality were but
a figure of rhetoric; we are not readily con
scious of His presence and of its effect on
ourselves. Our faith is real, it is sure; but
it has not gained its full strength, and it
has not led to as full knowledge as we feel
* So also as to the theology and the practice of Confirmation,
the Churches of the East and of the West are not in agreement;
and there is no consent as to the ' grace ' which it confers.

FAITH IN THE SPIRIT 115
we need. As the confession of the Son could
not be made in clear words until those who
believed in Him had challenged their faith
and contended for it, so the confession of
the Spirit calls for a stronger and more
searchingly tried faith than we now have.
When with the heart the Church steadfastly
believes in Him unto righteousness, then with
the mouth will she be able to make full
confession of Him unto salvation.

Here we have, then, a striking and most
important example of the Faith, in our tech
nical use of the word, waiting for faith and
manifestation. Thus it has been or is with
all truth, for practically all is reached and
acquired and acknowledged in the same way.
Thus, as the centuries have passed on, men
have believed and had faith in God, have
come to know Him and have declared their
faith and their knowledge in their Creed.
Thus, having their faith directed towards the
Son of God, they welcomed Him and knew
Him and saw in what terms they might sing
His greatness and His love. And in like

116 FAITH AND THE FAITH
manner, we who live in the age in which the
manifestation of the Spirit is taking place,
can trace somewhat of the progress of our
faith to knowledge and thence to boldness
of utterance, the plainness of speech,* which
elect souls shall first attain and which they
shall teach the Church. That expression of
faith, not fully declared in the form of
creed, is yet seen in the words as to progress
in sanctification and towards salvation which
have been added to the declaration that we
believe in the Holy Spirit. As we accept
and use the Church, the Scriptures, and the
Sacraments, we show that we do really be
lieve in the Holy Spirit, Who is the Church's
life, Who speaks in the Scriptures, Whose
power is operative in the Sacraments. As
we find forgiveness and grow in grace and
in the knowledge of the Lord and Saviour
Jesus Christ, we are conscious that the
Spirit's holiness and power are becoming
effective in us; and in our lives there is at
least the beginning of a revelation of Him,
as we find them quickened with new energy,
endowed with new freedom, directed in the
'wapptiaia. Acts iv. 31; II. Corinthians iii. 12; etc.

FAITH IN THE SPIRIT 117
way of right, supported in dangers, carried
through temptations, prepared to know Him
better, that "we may with steadfast faith
ever acknowledge " Him,
" The Spirit of Father and of Son,
One God in Persons Three."

Thus we may learn that our faith, our sure
confidence, our strong allegiance, may grow
even as our knowledge grows; and that there
should be for us a daily increase in all the
gifts of the Spirit, wisdom and understand
ing, counsel and ghostly strength, knowledge
and true godliness, and — crowning all the rest
and binding them together — the holy fear
of God. And thus we shall do somewhat
towards preparing the Church, in words of
Catholic truth and devotion, to make a full
declaration of faith, the Catholic Faith as to
the eternal and blessed Spirit Whom she
ever worships and Whose divine power she
constantly invokes.

LECTURE V
THE LIFE OF FAITH
Galatians ii. 20.
"0 6i vvv f 6 iv icierei f«i.
" And what I now live, I live in faith."
We have been engaged in a study of faith
and of its relation to the confession of faith
which is made by the Christian Church in the
recital of the Creed. And in particular we
have considered the fundamental truths of
faith, belief in God, belief in Jesus Christ,
and belief in the Holy Spirit, as presented
to our souls and as leading to confession by
our lips. Faith as personal allegiance and
faith as a source of knowledge we have seen
combining to increase the depth and the
extent of our apprehension of the realities
of the divine nature, of the truth of the Son
of God incarnate in human nature, and of
the Spirit of God as dwelling in the souls
of men. In these examples, which may well
118

THE LIFE OF FAITH 119
suggest others, we see both life and the reve
lation of truth growing out of faith, and
faith leading up to confession and guiding
it, even if it cannot be fully expressed by it.
For faith demands life, and is a condition of
life, and leads to life given and growing more
abundantly. Our special topic, then, to-day
is the Christian's Life of Faith.

If we go back to our definitions, or rather
to the New Testament statements in regard
to faith, we can see that each tells us some
what of the nature of the true life of the
soul. The truthfulness and trustworthiness
and allegiance of man to God-ward, what
are they but the working of a life, real and
moral, freely acting yet recognizing depend
ence and duty? Each in varied aspect tells
of a relationship, necessary yet gladly ac
knowledged, between us and the heavenly
Father. To trust Him, to respond to His
trust in us, to surrender ourselves to Him —
and all this is involved in the simplest
thought of faith — is to live a life of simple
yet strong relation to Him Who thus calls

120 FAITH AND THE FAITH
out our faith and therewith quickens our
belief: "He that believeth hath life." Re
call the definition with which the writer
to the Hebrews introduces the record of
some of the great heroes of faith: you will
see that that which gives reality to hope and
proves things not seen must be a power to
influence life.* And as you read on you
will find the effects of this faith shown in
life. It led one of the men of oldest time
to offer worship, and another to build an
ark; one to exchange his home for a place
of sojourn in a strange land, and another
to do such quiet duty that all we need
know of him is that He pleased God. It
inspired some to die in hope of a coming
deliverance, and one specially chosen as a
leader to do his varied work as seeing Him
Who is invisible. And in the days of judges
and prophets and Maccabees it made men
and women brave to suffer and to do, to
become such that the world was not worthy
of them, and to die without complaining
that they had not yet received the promise.
All this has to do, indeed, with the external,
• Hebrews xi.

THE LIFE OF FAITH 121
but in its every item it witnesses to char
acter; if these men and women had not lived
in faith, it could not have been written that
in faith they died. Pass on to St. John's
writings in Gospel and Epistle and Apoc
alypse; and, as we have seen already, faith
is there identified with life and life with
faith. To believe, he tells us both when
he is reporting the Lord's sayings and when
he is speaking from his own experience, is
to have the true strong victorious life of the
soul; nay, the victory that overcometh the
world is our faith. And in his words as
to the great assurances, he says : " These
things I write to you that ye may know that
ye have eternal life, to you who are believers
on the Name of the Son of God." "The
Son of God hath given us discernment of
mind to know the Very One, and we are in
the Very One, in His Son Jesus Christ. He
is the Very God and life eternal." *
Look at the argumentative words in which
St. Paul deals with faith as opposed to
works, with the justification which God
freely gives as opposed to the righteousness
• John iii. 36, vi. 40; I. John v. 4, 5, 13, 20.

122 FAITH AND THE FAITH
which is by the law, and you will find
him closely connecting the life of the soul
with faith: "I through law once died to
law, that I may live to God; I have been
crucified with Christ, and I am living no
longer myself but there is living in me
Christ; and what I now am living in flesh,
in faith I am living — the faith of the Son of
God, of Him Who loved me and gave Him
self up for me." * The depth of these and
such like words no man can sound; their
truth is certified by the experience of our
own souls in their progress in that which is
distinctively their life.
Verily our life is life of faith; faith is its
principle, faith its test, faith its goal, faith —
may we not say? — its reward.
II
But let us trace out the steps of the life
of the child of God, and see how from its
simple beginning to its full completion they
are all guided by faith, they are all acts of
faith. This is true, whether that life is con
sidered as God's gift growing under His
• Galatians ii. 19, 20.

THE LIFE OF FAITH
care, or as lived by man under circumstances
which he has it in his power to control.
It is certainly God's gift. It has its be
ginning from Him and He is its source and
origin. Why the life of the Almighty and
self-sufficing God should flow forth, pro
ducing a creation and continuing that crea
tion in existence, we cannot tell; why He
should desire the existence of something
which should appear to be beyond Himself,
the mind is baffled at any attempt to explain;
why He should call into existence, by pro
cesses of long continuance and by an evolu
tion not always uniform in operation, rational
beings with the power of refusing obedience
to His will, is the puzzle of the universe.
Again, we know but in part the method of
His action, and of its principles our mind
and our soul cannot take cognizance; how
God created we do not know, and how at
the last He gave man an existence seemingly
so independent of His own we do not know.
It is now, as it was near the beginning of
this dispensation : " By faith we apprehend
that the ages were fashioned by an utterance
of God, with the result that what is seen

124 FAITH AND THE FAITH
hath not come into existence out of things
phenomenal, things that are appearing."*
And true though it is that the study of
God's work, in that to which it has already
reached and that to which it is evidently tend
ing, does justify His ways by what we are
sure will be a righteous theodicy, both the dis
covery of the largely unproved purpose and
the vision of the final result are great acts
of faith, and that too of faith which has
been exercised and trained for deep under
standing and lofty ventures. Faith, accept
ing the fact and having little knowledge of
the efficient and the final cause, is yet bold
to say that the Creator will at the last be
justified for the most awful act of omnipo
tence, the creation of a rational being en
dowed with free will, and in the result of
that system of training through temptation
and choice and growth of character — the at
tainment of character by the use of discipline
— which shall prove itself worthy of God and
of man.
But I think that when we speak of the
life of the soul we have specially in mind
• Hebrews xi. 3.

THE LIFE OF FAITH 125
that life which is in its operation the process
of salvation and of which the New Testa
ment speaks so earnestly and constantly.
This, which is really God living in man, and
so far from limiting his personality really
calling it out and building it up, is in its
every step from God, known, apprehended,
put into operation, and kept in operation
by faith. Its first action is from God's call
ing; its first formal act is God's regeneration,
the implanting in us of the germ of the
spiritual, which is equivalent to the begin
ning of a personal relation to God; its con
stant supply is seen in the guidance of the
Holy Spirit, the acceptance and use of which
means constant progress; its reward is God's
gift, suited to His call, His regeneration,
His guidance, which could come indeed from
naught else, and by necessity comes thence
to those who receive it. Each step as we
thus trace the life in its aspect God-ward
appeals to faith, to faith as an element of
character and faith as an act of knowledge,
to the tender of allegiance and the acceptance
of knowledge of the unseen.
When viewed from the man-ward side, the

126 FAITH AND THE FAITH
Christian life is marked at the first by ac
ceptance of the calling, then more definitely
by conversion which is the normal concomi
tant of regeneration, passing on to the ex
tended process of sanctification under God's
guidance, and having for its issue victory
which as coming from God is our reward.
As to most of us God's call comes quietly,
so early indeed that we carry no distinct
memory of it, and few of us know more
of our acceptance of the call than that we
must have tendered it when our souls first
grasped the thought that we stood in some
relation to God, that God was a reality to
us. It was faith in its germ, but true faith,
which made the response then; those with
whom still dwells the consciousness of the
call can testify to the reality of the response
which they gave, and gave through faith
and in the operation of its power. Conver
sion, hard (especially for us Churchmen) to
define because of the inaccurate and perverse
definitions which have been given to the
word — conversion, which at least involves the
conscious recognition of a relation to God,
what it is and what it ought to be, and the

THE LIFE OF FAITH 127
determination to make it what it ought to
be, the resolution of man, knowing his sin
fulness and his weakness, to seek pardon
from Him Who alone can forgive and
strength from Him without Whom nothing
is strong; conversion, impossible in its Chris
tian sense without regeneration, and abso
lutely necessary that regeneration may lead
to any result; conversion, dependent alto
gether we are sure upon God's grace, and
yet our act as by God's grace inspired —
this is the work of faith, recognizing duty,
proffering allegiance, grasping realities, de
termined to do and to suffer for the truth's
sake. Sanctification, the daily increase in
God's Holy Spirit under the guidance of
that Spirit more and more, the advance into
and in holiness, the progressive cleansing and
strengthening of the character, its greater
value and its greater usefulness, its widening
knowledge and its deepening religion, in all
dependent and acknowledging that it is de
pendent upon the Divine guidance — this is
the work of faith and comes from what faith
is and what faith can do. And what we
call the victory, as it comes from man's

128 FAITH AND THE FAITH
fidelity, and the reward, as it comes from
God's truth, this is — to use again St. John's
bold words — our faith, in that it triumphs
over the world and all that is worldly, all
that is transitory because it is temporal and
thus out of the range of faith; may it not
be quite as literally that the reward shall be
greater visions of the unseen, greater power
to do the impossible, greater inspiration for
worship and for service?
The true life of the Christian — to it we
come by faith, into it we are born by faith,
in it by faith we make progress, its victorious
and perfect issue is faith. Our life hath been
hidden and remains hidden, as Christ is
hidden, in God ; * and this certainly means
that only by the loftiest and mightiest opera
tions of faith is it felt and known, used and
strengthened and perfected. There is no
true life in man which is not the life of
faith. Ill
I fear lest I may seem to detract from
the reality or the spirituality of the life of
• Colossians iii. 3, 4.

THE LIFE OF FAITH 129
faith when I affirm that it is rightly de
scribed as the sacramental life. The word
' sacramental ' may seem to mean either cere
monial as some understand it or figurative
as it presents itself to others; and certainly
the life of faith is not a life of external
observances or unreality. It must indeed
have an expression in acts, and those acts
will be largely acts of worship; it must also
be confessed as beyond the power of expres
sion, and therefore the words in which its
truth is uttered must be in a sense but
symbols. But we must claim for the word
' sacramental ' an interpretation which guards
against perversion on the one side or the
other. A sacrament is an external truth
or action so connected with an internal truth
or action that it bears witness to it, represents
it, is affected by it, and in turn affects it.
All manifestations of God are sacramental,
for they come from Him and declare His
perfections and manifest His attributes un
der necessary limitations. All manifestations
of fundamental and ideal truth are sacra
mental for the self -same reason; they come
necessarily from the truth to beings who

130 FAITH AND THE FAITH
have the capacity for receiving them, and
they both reveal and impart the truth.
Nature in her wonderful beauty and order
and might and beneficence is sacramental;
she imparts a knowledge of God and calls
to His worship, and as we listen to her
voice and follow her leading she brings to
us the life of her Creator. Thought and
reason are sacramental when they turn upon
lofty objects, and bid us know the inner
meaning of things with the secret of their
purpose and their action. Nothing which
is unseen is manifested except sacramentally ;
and the mean whereby the reality and the
power of the unseen is given to us is faith.
The life of faith in our souls is therefore
sacramental, given to us and continued in
us by a power, unseen indeed, but of the
reality of which we cannot doubt; and its
greatest and most necessary acts have to do
with God's greatest and most efficient sacra
ments, that by which the true life of the
soul is once bestowed and that by which that
life is ever derived and quickened and enabled
to grow. The special requisite for the recep
tion of the benefit of each is faith. If re-

THE LIFE OF FAITH 131
pentance is put before faith as required of
those who come to receive Baptism, it is
because, in thought at least, the knowledge
of our want must precede our seeking for
the supply of that want; but for supply of
our want faith is necessary, " whereby we
stedfastly believe the promises of God made
to us in that sacrament." And in like man
ner, in the Catechism's enumeration of what
is required of those who come to the Lord's
Supper, after the call to repentance of former
sins and the purpose to lead a new life, we
are bidden to " have a lively faith in God's
mercy through Christ." In fact, in what
way soever we regard the sacraments which
Christ hath ordained in His Church, we find
that they appeal to faith, to our acceptance of
God's promise, to our professing and proffer
ing allegiance to Him, and to our search for
truth more profound and more real than that
which reaches us through our senses.
If we look upon the sacraments as sym
bols, as indeed all acknowledge that they are,
then in the washing which cleanses the body
and in the eating and drinking which main
tain its life we find presented to our souls

132 FAITH AND THE FAITH
an opportunity of their washing from sin
and their strengthening for duty which can
come only from God's action upon them in
His forgiving and strengthening grace. If
we recognize in the sacraments a mystic
truth, then certain it is that they lead to the
union of our souls with our Lord, in such wise
that we enter into His holy life and are built
up in it. If we speak of them as spiritual,
it can hardly be without an acknowledgment
that the spiritual has to do with the very
centre of our life, that the spiritual is the
source of our existence, that it modifies and
controls all our faculties and powers, and
that by it we are brought under an influence
which can change all that we have into the
reality of likeness to God. If the sacraments
have a human side, as we cannot doubt, they
have to do with man at his best, or certainly
at the possibility of his best; if they have a
divine side, as confessedly they have, it is
because in them God is taking hold of us
and is bidding us take hold of Himself.
There must be in them a great reality, the
reality of the spirit, of the unseen, of God.
Therefore in whatever way we regard

THE LIFE OF FAITH
them, they call for our apprehension of the
unseen, our knowledge of God, our faith;
and thus they are real things, not barren
figures of the absent, but themselves through
our faith bringing with them that whereof
they tell and — we almost venture to say —
being that of which they are the assurance.
What is true of the two sacraments, prop
erly so called, is true of every act of the
Christian life, whether it seems mystical or
practical, whether it has to do with worship
or with work. " The life which I now live,
I live by faith in the Son of God"; so was
St. Paul writing; but he was not content
to leave his testimony indefinite, and he ap
plied it to even the lowest phase of his activity :
" The life which I now live in the flesh,
I live by faith." * The power unseen, that
is to say, guided all that he did; laying hold
on the springs of being and of action, it
made his whole life sacramental, real and
strong, because a greater life was guiding it
and perfecting it; each outward and visible
act came from an inward and spiritual grace.
The sacramental life seeks for the outward
signs and uses them, because of this very
• Galatians ii. 20.

134 FAITH AND THE FAITH
connection, and thus it quickens the external
life with the spirit of worship, and balances
what might else be mechanically practical by
the mystical atmosphere which brightens it
and makes it joyful. The life which finds its
inspiration in that tone of devotion and
work for the Master which our Book of Com
mon Prayer so wonderfully commends and
inculcates is the life of faith and sacrament,
the eternal life which is already for the be
liever a real and enduring possession.
IV
After what has been said in regard to our
faith in God and in Jesus Christ and in the
Holy Spirit, we shall not be surprised if
we find the faith by which we live — fides qua
vivitur — undefinable and not always able to
give a full account of itself. When we at
tempt to define that which is truly of faith
and sacramental, we either materialize it by
bringing it into the class of things sensible,
or we evaporate it by denying to it even the
property of being apprehensible. The ju
dicious Hooker saw that to be true of the
Lord's Supper which is true of all matters

THE LIFE OF FAITH 135
and facts that are spiritually discerned, that
men are so determined to put their thoughts —
even their unsettled and controversial thoughts
— into words, that the imperfection of their
statements makes their thoughts still less
adequate than before to represent the truth
which in its essence they believe.* If men —
so in substance he pleaded — would but agree
to profess and teach that as to which they are
in agreement, great would be the beauty
and the power of their utterance; the high
est revelation would inspire but praise, the
deepest mysteries would teach but humble
adoration. So plead the thoughtful leaders
of men in our own day. Men's beliefs lie
beneath their words, and we can often see,
and often confidently assume, that they are
in harmony when their expression is in
harmonious if not inconsistent. In our pri
vate devotions as we prepare for the reception
of the greatest of sacraments, and in the
worship of the congregation as we draw near
in faith, we pass beneath the simple phrasing
of our own prayers or above the dignified
utterance of our historic liturgy, to know
* Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, V. xvii. 12.

136 FAITH AND THE FAITH
Who it is Whose voice speaks to our souls
and why we are following the guidance of
His voice. It may be that, if we were
called to give utterance to our faith, we
should not use the words which would come
to the lips of the scholarly priest who min
isters to us, or the words which would be
used by the thankful saint or the penitent
sinner who kneels at our side; but we know,
to use Hooker's phrase, the cogitations which
possess the soul of each faithful communi
cant: "O my God, Thou art true; O my
soul, thou art happy."
The words of controversy or of explanation
are not necessary for the faith of the life,
the belief of the soul; and the pious con
troversialist — for such there are — falls back
on simple faith in the hour of repentance,
of thanksgiving, of communion with his
Lord. That simple faith does not differ
greatly in truly devout souls. It witnesses
the essential fact that man is brought near
to God, that man trusts God and surrenders
himself to Him to receive blessing and to
render service, and that thus man knows
God as God knows him. It does not make

THE LIFE OF FAITH 137
little of the external act, for that is of the
very nature of sacrament; but it passes
through it to the great spiritual truth which
it represents and to which it leads : " that
the person baptized may receive the everlast
ing benediction of God's heavenly washing,"
that the believing communicant may become
a " partaker of Christ's most precious Body
and Blood," " his sinful body being made
clean by Christ's Body and his soul washed
through Christ's Blood."
But the sacramental life, as we have noted
already, is not confined to the faithful use of
the two great sacraments, though it can be
seen in every deed to be based upon them,
nor yet to the blessing which reaches us
through other ordinances that are rightly
termed sacramental. It is the whole life of
the Christian as it is consciously lived within
the covenant. It is hidden with Christ in
God, and therefore it is in all its parts
Christian and divine. Its principle is sim
ple, its manifestations are many and com
plicated, its methods and its powers are
beyond the ability of tongue to express or
even of mind to conceive; and while its stay

138 FAITH AND THE FAITH
is the faith, the Creed with its witness to
faith and the Faith, its reality does not
depend upon it; rather it testifies to the
reality of which the Creed is the expression.
Study, as carefully as you will and dare,
any good disciple in whom you recognize
the life of faith; and you will be able to
discern the realities on which it rests and
the facts to which it testifies ; they are the
facts of what we call the Faith, but the
realities are those of faith as the fundamen
tal principle.

Thus then we see in the Christian life the
same principle which is strikingly illustrated
in the Christian profession. Its central act
or fact is allegiance to God, and union with
Him; and this allegiance and union with the
divine, with Father and Son and Holy
Spirit, is expressed in thought and in speech
by simple utterances, the value of which is
enhanced as they express the faith of a body
of believing people; for they, conscious of
one life, utter each his "I believe " with the
strength and the challenge of a common con-

THE LIFE OF FAITH 139
viction and a common duty, yes and with
the energy of a common inspiration. As
members of the body, the organic company
of those who have been called into the life
of Christ that they may believe in Him and
know Him, and who have come to believe
in Him and know Him that they may par
take yet more fully of His Spirit and His
life, they have a unity more close and com
plete than can possibly be found or held
in any other way; they believe in one God,
they know and hold allegiance to one Lord,
they have the life of one Spirit. That
faith, that allegiance, that life, are great
realities, destined to endure and to become
more strong through the experience of one
who has them — yet not without the danger
that by his own fault they may be weakened
or even lost. And the fact that they can be
attained and held in no other way than by
acceptance of the truth makes it necessary
that those who hold them shall unite in their
recognition of the truth, that they who are
one body because they hold one faith and
are in allegiance to one Lord shall confess
one Creed. But here, as elsewhere, alle-

140 FAITH AND THE FAITH
giance lies back of the Creed, and faith pre
pares the way for the Faith.
With creeds, the expression of the essen
tials of our belief in words, we should place,
I think, Christian worship and Christian
ordinances, the expressions of our belief in
acts, and those the acts of a body of be
lievers. It is no little thing that all Western
Christendom is content to use a very ancient
and simple baptismal creed as a sufficient
statement of its Christian faith, of the faith
of its myriad congregations, of the faith of
its innumerable members. And it is even
more wonderful that all Christendom, East
ern and Western, when in the Eucharistic
service it wishes to make a more explicit
defence of its faith, should still be content
to use words which come from the councils
of the fourth and fifth centuries. The rea
son is that these formularies do so express
and guard that to which the faith and rea
son of believers have long and unitedly given
assent, that we know the certainty and the
reasonableness of their interpretation, and
that the tone of controversy, absent from the
one, has in the other become an acknowl-

THE LIFE OF FAITH 141
edgment of the victory of truth and faith.
And the daily offices, with psalms and les
sons and hymns and prayers, the sacramental
services with words of confession and obla
tion and adoration, the special services for
the most solemn occasions in life — these are
all professions of faith, applicable to the
needs of any human being who within the
covenant looks for the blessings covenanted
by faith. As with the Creeds, so with the
Church's other formularies; all who have
Christian faith as the rule of their lives,
all whose lives are lived in the faith of the
Son of God, the Saviour, may enter into the
Church's worship; for she has confidence that
their faith finds its expression in her Faith,
or — if we may so phrase it — that she may
make her Faith the expressions of their al
legiance and their belief. Thus one great
principle runs through all true religious life,
and faith is the victory that overcometh the
world.

The thought which has in my mind under
lain the argument of these lectures has an

142 FAITH AND THE FAITH
application, I think, to some controverted
matters which hardly ought to be matters of
controversy at all. If the faith uttered in
words is an attempt to express faith which
really exists in the soul, then, while our re
sponsibility for a right expression is great,
the value of the belief exceeds the value of
the form of words in which it is stated. If
faith in God leads us to faith in God's Son
and Word and Spirit, it is not necessary
that always and everywhere we should insist
on the use of words which have never passed
into the Creeds and are not employed theo
logically in the Prayer Book. If faith in
Jesus Christ means for us that He is the
eternal Son who has taken man's nature
that He may bring man to God, then the
technical terms needed for no other purpose
than to establish that faith — none of them,
except ' being of one substance with,' * hav
ing been brought into formal use — may not
be thought of as under all circumstances
necessary for Christian fellowship and Chris
tian life. If the life of faith is the life of all
Christian men, then we may not make it a
* 6/ioovaiog.

FAITH IN THE SPIRIT 143
condition of recognition of this life that the
manner of its reception or its progress should
be described in the same terms by all those
who use its appointed means. The old terms,
made more valuable by continued use, will
doubtless long continue in lands in which the
Greek influence prevails in language and in
philosophy; but in the case of nations out
side of that influence, some of which we are
now seeking to call into the Church, we
must not lay such stress on the phraseology
of the confession as to imperil the reception
of that faith which alone can give it value.
And among ourselves, whose duty it is
so to present the ancient faith that it may
be accepted by the honest and true hearts of
a new generation — a generation which is pas
sionately seeking for truth, — we must be
ware lest we insist, or seem to insist, on
formulas when we mean to lay stress on
truth; and above all we must beware lest
by putting our own glosses upon accepted
forms of words we narrow the truth which
they do really convey, narrow the generous
faith which consents to them, and even nar
row the company of faithful people who can

144 FAITH AND THE FAITH
honestly worship and serve in accordance
with them. Our Prayer Book represents a
generosity of worship, as our Creeds — and I
do not hesitate to add our Articles — repre
sent a generosity of faith; each can be held
with absolute fidelity to the authority of
Scripture and of the Church, because each
can be held with absolute fidelity to faith
tested by reason, which is our personal reli
ance on God, the inspiration of our fidelity
to Him, the source of our knowledge of
Him, the very victory in which stands our
salvation. That faith shall ever remain in the
souls of men, in the Creeds of the Church,
in sacramental worship, and in spiritual life;
it must be tried, as it has been and is tried;
but it shall grow stronger in all the ages,
and its hymns of victory shall never cease
to echo in "heaven's eternal arches."
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