therein lies the peculiarity of Christian faith. It is an eye which is made to see; it remains the same eye, so long as it be used, whatever it may see. It is a hand which may be reached out for any gift, but it remains a hand alike when a stone is given it instead of bread, and when it receives the ambrosia of the gods. But what a blessed thing it is to find the true object of our faith, to see with our eye and to grasp with our hand the most precious things of life! Christian faith lays hold upon the one thing needful. It is a trust upon the true God and Jesus Christ His Son. It receives the blessing of God's redemptive grace.

We are now prepared to see how faith justifies. The faith of justification is the sinner's personal trust in Jesus Christ the Saviour. Moved by God's Spirit, attracted by the invitations of the Gospel, feeling his dependence and need, seeing in Christ the supply of all his wants, he freely puts himself into the Saviour's hands that he may be justified and saved by him, giving himself to God through Christ. This trust involves a self-abnegation, a self-emptying, a turning away from all self-help, an utter renunciation of all reliance upon self-wrought righteousness. It is an act of will-free, rational-made in view of the truth. It involves the highest exercise of the power of choice, for it is concerned with the chief end of life. But while it is in this sense an activity of the will, it is a receptive activity; it is a stretching out of an empty hand to receive an undeserved gift. Now faith justifies because it thus opens the soul to the grace of God and Christ. It is because the sinner has thus put himself at the disposal of Christ for time and for eternity, to be moulded and shaped by him, because he has given up all trust in himself and thrown himself upon Christ in entire dependence, that God can for Christ's sake forgive him and reinstate him in all the lost privileges of sonship. By his faith he is united to Christ, and God sees him not as he is in him

self, but as he is in Christ, and for Christ's sake He forgives him and begins upon the work of sanctifying him. The sinner in childlike trust has cast himself upon God and Christ, and he has received from them the riches of forgiving grace and the assurance of sanctifying grace. How different such faith as this is from the acceptance of a system of doctrines or the yielding to the authority of a church! How immense the result! Horace Bushnell has described the true saving faith in the simplicity of the truth: "Christian faith," he says, "is the faith of a transaction. It is not the committing of one's thought in assent to any proposition, but the trusting of one's being to a being, there to be rested, kept, guided, moulded, governed, and possessed forever." "It gives you God, fills you with God in immediate, experimental knowledge, puts you in possession of all there is in him, and allows you to be invested with his character itself" (Life of Bushnell, p. 192 seq.).

We can thus see why there is nothing meritorious in faith. It is indeed a good work-the best work we ever do; it is a work in all reality. But it has no merit. Faith is valuable not for what it is but for what it receives. It is a vessel which is intrinsically of no worth, but only for what it contains. It is a hand which may receive a gift but can give none. This is the nature of faith always. Some people have the notion that if their faith were only strong enough or intense enough they could accomplish anything with it; they regard it as an omnipotent power. But nothing could be more mistaken. The power is all of God, and faith is only the medium through which it is received. If God should withhold His gift faith would remain poor empty faith. It does not follow that because in the days of Christ and the apostles miracles were wrought through the instrumentality of faith, our faith in these days of God's quieter providential workings is less genuine. It was not the faith which

wrought the miracles, but God who wrought them through the faith. If God had a reason for miracles then which He does not have now, it does not follow that our faith is any the less real. The empty vessel received one kind of filling then; it receives another kind now. That is all the difference. The vessel itself may be as good, or better -and certainly the gifts are better for us. No amount of faith will compel God to give what He does not regard as best for us. Faith as a grain of mustard-seed is sufficient to remove mountains, if God has them ready for us to remove; and faith mountain-great is insufficient to move a mustard-seed, if God deems it not best that it should be moved. Now such an activity as this, which derives all its worth from what it receives, can have no merit. It leaves the sinner utterly dependent upon God. All that he has he has received. All that he hopes for will come to him of pure unmerited grace. There is no merit in the fact that the man in peril, around whom a rope is thrown, does not cast it off, that he co-operates with those who are saving him. Yet he might never be saved unless he thus freely gave himself up, and the sinner would never be saved unless he had faith. Looking at it merely as an indispensable condition, faith has a very considerable importance; but looking at it in relation to the gift of God through Jesus Christ our Lord, it is as nothing.

I have spoken here particularly of the first act of faith, the justifying faith by which the sinner enters the kingdom of God. But it is to be remembered that faith is essential all through the Christian life. It is not only the condition of justification, but also of sanctification. The just shall live by faith. All God's gifts come to men through its medium. It enters into character, for it involves a permanent choice and is concerned with the supreme choice of life. At the first it is an act, a transaction," as Bushnell called it; but it becomes a permanent attitude of the soul toward God and Jesus Christ.

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We often talk as if faith were only for this life. But Paul tells us that faith, like love and hope, abides (1 Cor. xiii. 13). It will not be "changed to sight," as we sometimes say, but when the time of higher vision comes, faith will merely find a higher exercise. Through all eternity it will be the hand which will receive God's largess. We shall never reach a point where our relation to God and Christ will be any other than that of trust and depend

ence.

Such is faith, and such justification by faith. Whoever understands this doctrine understands the Gospel. Whoever has a personal faith in Jesus Christ, possesses in him wisdom and righteousness and sanctification and redemption (1 Cor. i. 30).

XXV.

THE NEW LIFE

LET us take up once more the clew which has guided us through all our wanderings in the mazes of theology-the doctrine of God's redemptive kingdom. The kingdom is the chief end of God's plan and of man's existence. The sinner's misery and guilt consist in the fact that he is falling short of his chief end, since by his sin he is outside of the kingdom and unable in his own strength to re-enter it. Christ by his redemptive work has provided a way for the sinner to become once more a member of the kingdom. and attain his chief end in it. Through the divine justification or forgiveness, appropriated by faith, he is admitted to the kingdom so far as his outward relations are. concerned; God's grace transforms displeasure into favor and restores the sinner to his lost sonship, making him an heir of God and joint-heir with Christ. But justification, with its change of outward relations, is only a means. to an end, namely, to the attainment of the chief end, the actual redemption. There is therefore need of an internal change, a transformation of the spiritual life, an actual achievement of sonship. Amnesty looks forward to reconstruction and the attainment of all the ends of citizenship. It is of this new life, the actual realization of man's chief end in the soul itself, so far as this result is attained. in the present world, that I wish to speak at this time.

I. The new life begins in that great spiritual crisis. which we call the change of heart. This is a revolution of the most radical character. The whole bent and direc