SERMON III.

OFFICE AND PROVINCE OF FAITH.

1 John v. 4.

This is the victory that overcometh the world, even our faith.

THE chief object of the former sermons has been to establish, that Faith, in its scriptural sense, is not a bare intellectual assent to religious truth, but a practical lively apprehension of it, whereby that truth determines and shapes our conduct, and manifests itself therein; that this Faith is essentially a practical principle, a practical power; and that its seat, as was truly laid down by the Fathers of the Reformation, is not in the Understanding alone, but mainly in the Will, or rather in that central primary principle of our personality, in which the Understanding, the Affections, and the Will coexist in their original unity. When we have attained to a full conviction on this point, so as to keep ever in mind that this is the true nature of Faith, most of the difficulties, which beset the common lifeless notion of it, pass away; a wide prospect opens before us, in which objects, hitherto wrapt in mist, come forth clearly and intelligibly; and we gain a cheering insight into the workings of Faith, and its power. Indeed this is the stirring gladdening reward, which ever waits upon the discovery of truth, that it not only solves the question directly at issue, but throws a bright harmonizing light over the whole region around. For light is by its

very nature diffusive, impatient of all exclusiveness, of all bound and limit, of all check and restraint, and cannot fall on any one object, without spreading over those about it. They who seek in a right spirit, in a spirit of faith and diligence and self-devotion, will not merely find what they seek, but far more. They come ever and anon to one of those centres, whence the rays of truth branch off, and where what may otherwise seem a confused medley and knot of intricacies, settles at once into order and distinctness. If we adopt the common acceptation of Faith, as a mere work of the Understanding, we are entangled at every step in the most bewildering perplexities. At every step our hearts and our consciences lift up their voices in denial of what we are taught to receive as the word of God. We are told that Faith is to justify us; and we feel that such Faith does not justify us. We are told that it is to produce holiness of life; and we feel that it does not exercise the slightest influence on our conduct. We are told that it is to endow us with all power and might; and we feel that it leaves us just as feeble and helpless, just as much the slaves of passion, and the prey of temptation, as ever. We are told that it is the victory which overcometh the world; and we feel that this is the very triumph of the world, to overcome, not the blind, but the seeing; that the captives and victims on whom it prides itself the most, are those who have been taught, who know, whose understandings acknowledge, that the wages of sin is death, and shame, and abject endless misery,—those whose reason declares to them that no lasting peace or joy or comfort is to be found, except in the presence of God;-those who, being in torments, behold Lazarus afar off in Abraham's bosom, yet see at the same time that there is a great

gulf between, over which they cannot pass. We are bid to examine the evidences of Christianity, that so our belief may be rendered more certain. In such a state of mind a treatise on evidences is likelier to produce doubt than conviction. For however valid a title may be, hardly will titledeeds be found, in which captious ingenuity may not detect a flaw: and then, if the validity of the title is to rest upon the deeds, it falls to the ground. At all events such enquiries draw us away from the sacred building which Christ reared, and from the duties which we have to discharge in it, to the quarries whence its materials are taken. In those quarries the idea of the building is nowhere to be found; we never see it as a whole; we learn nothing of the relation and harmony of its parts, nothing of its purpose, of the shelter it affords: instead of this we waste our time in a number of heterogeneous and comparatively petty researches. Or let our conviction become as strong as it is possible for any conviction built upon evidence to be, as strong as our conviction of the Norman conquest, or of the existence of the Roman empire; still we feel that in the matters in which we want help, and in which we are promist that Faith shall strengthen us, such a conviction avails us nothing. We feel that, though such light may shine on the darkness of our nature, yet the darkness comprehendeth it not; that it does not transfigure the darkness into light, but only serves to discover forms of woe, prowling about or cowering beneath it. In fact Faith is not primarily a light of the soul. Though its gaze ought ever to be fixt on the source of all light, it looks to that source rather in the first instance as being at the same time the source of all warmth and of all life. It is the living principle by which the soul drinks in life from the heavenly Fountain of

life and only as the recipient of the light from above, does it become the light of every one in whom it shines.

When a person is in the state of mind just described, a wise spiritual counsellor will hardly say to him, The Bible declares that Faith does possess all the virtues, which you pretend you cannot find in it: therefore you must receive the declaration of the Bible as absolute truth, without hesitation or questioning, however your own feelings, however your own consciousness may revolt against it. This is not the way in which St Paul put down errour, - by a peremptory exertion of authority. He ever tried to win over the Understanding and the Heart, by shewing how the truths he was commissioned to proclaim, inhere in the very first principles of the Christian life, and how the errours he had to reprove were at war with those principles. Nor will any rightminded teacher of the Gospel be content to prolong the discord between the word of God, and that voice which rises from the depths of man's soul. As St Paul at Athens took occasion from the altar dedicated to the Unknown God, to declare that God to the Athenians, whom they were already worshiping without knowing him, so will every teacher, who has the spirit of St Paul, examine and interrogate the voice in man's heart, until he makes it bear witness to the truth of God's word. He will tune the strings, before he begins to play on them. Indeed this is one among the proofs of the antichristian spirit, which has borne such sway in the Romish Church, that it so often issued its dogmas with little else to support them than its anathemas. Yet they who build upon anathemas are as though they built upon barrels of gunpowder, and sooner or later are themselves consumed in the explosion. Whenever a doctrine of the Gospel is promulgated in such a manner, as to

appear plainly at variance with the calmly exercised Reason and Consciousness of mankind, we may feel sure that either there must be something erroneous in its exposition, - from a misunderstanding and misuse of terms,—from the neglect, it may be, of coordinate truths,-from making that absolute, which was meant relatively; or else that it is brought before a wrong tribunal, and tried by principles and categories which do not apply to it. Not seldom both these things will happen at once: for errours propagate each other; and one false step is mostly followed by a second, though often in an opposite direction. In the present instance, as we have seen, the errour lies in the false conception substituted for the Christian idea of Faith. According to this false and lifeless conception, the mighty workings ascribed to Faith become utterly incomprehensible, repugnant to all experience, and would seem as though they could only be wrought by some kind of magical charm. Yet this is a notion by which numbers beguile themselves, namely, that an intellectual assent to the articles of the Creed, especially if it be accompanied by an easy placidity of temper, and by decency of outward behaviour, entitles them to all the privileges of the Gospel, and will prove a valid passport into the kingdom of heaven. In many minds, among those who sometimes venture knee-deep into reasoning, this nominal profession of Faith will be undermined by a tacit, half-unconscious unbelief; and then, alarmed by its tottering, they abandon all reflexion on a subject, the difficulties of which seem to become more intricate and obscure, the more they are examined and investigated. Thus, as the extension of a power beyond its proper sphere ever tends to weaken it even within that sphere, the usurpation of the whole