escape the fruitless utterance at the last great day of the "Lord, Lord" which has been faithlessly uttered here, to look into your hearts and give yourselves in the sight of God an honest account of your Churchgoings, your almsgivings, your fastings, your Communions, or of the absence of these blessed habits, and see how far you can reconcile your motive in the one case or your practice in the other, with the revealed Will of God, and trust God Who says through His dear Son that they who wish to do that Will, shall know of the doctrine; and the knowledge which Jesus imparts, knowledge of Himself, knowledge of yourself, is knowledge which shall make you wise unto life eternal. Oh for the possession of that perfect submission to the Will of God, which may make us indeed of but little estimation here, but which shall include us in the number of those of whom it is written "They shall be mine, saith the Lord, in the day when I make up my jewels."

XVIII.

ROOTED IN FAITH.

S. JOHN xiv. 1.

Ye believe in God, believe also in me.

To speak of Faith is, indeed, to go back to first principles. For objectively, that is, looking out of ourselves, the matters Faith has to deal with are the first of all; such as the existence from all eternity of God, and then the Creation, the first revealed to us of all His works, and all His works from then till now; and subjectively, that is, looking into ourselves, Faith is not only the one requirement that God makes of us towards Himself, but in the nature of things it is the only faculty whereby we can have any intercourse with the unseen world; nay, it is necessary for our primary acceptance of the dogma that there is a God. And yet, first principle as it is, common as the word is, I feel that explanation rather than apology is needed for my introducing this subject in the abstract even to a congregation so far advanced as this. who knows experimentally what Faith is? who has tried to analyse it philosophically? who has tested

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the quantity and quality of it in themselves? Our blessed Lord once sorrowfully asked the question, "When the Son of Man cometh, shall He find faith on the earth?" and even a superficial observer would have little hesitation in saying that let the prevalent course of thought run on in its present groove, and there will be no long time before the gauge of Faith would indicate that if abounding unbelief be the sign of the times that are to witness the Second Advent of our Lord then all is indeed being rapidly made ready for His coming.

And in saying this do not understand that I am aiming at those who avowedly cast off the creed of Christianity. Such people are not in the habit of presenting themselves in the House of God; and it is to those who are here, not to those who are absent, that, God helping me, I would preach. Judgment must first begin, we are told, at the House of God; and if judgment begin there, we may reasonably suppose it is because iniquity is found there. Therefore, dear brethren, to you, nay, to myself, would I put the question, can Christ's words in the earlier part of the text be applied to us? Can one truly say to us "Ye believe in God"? can we feel that we have so strong a faith in the God of nature that that can be made a ground of appeal to us to believe also in the God of grace? Seriously, brethren, do we know what Faith is? Everybody almost is familiar with S. Paul's grand exposition of the nature and the effects of Faith in the eleventh of Hebrews. Long ago we learned that verse, "Faith is the substance of things hoped for,

the evidence of things not seen;" but even now as we say it what impression does it leave on our minds? Let us examine that passage. S. Paul is speaking of that Faith implied in the earlier part of our text, "Ye believe in God." He had been urging on the Hebrews the great danger of that want of Faith in God; that reliance on self which God Himself denounced in the phrase, "If any man draw back, my soul shall have no pleasure in him." He is going on to comfort the souls of the Christians in their terrible trials by reminding them what triumphs Faith had won in the persons of the patriarchs and saints of the elder dispensation. He inserts a short parenthesis as a definition of Faith. He passes on to the Creation as the great illustration of the nature of Faith, and the first great object for it to rest on. "By Faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things that do appear." He gives this first as an illustration of the action and working of Faith. Things appeared not, things were not seen; as we should promptly say, because they did not exist. Though we must recollect that everything existed potentially from all eternity in the will of God; and everything that has been created, or that shall have been created or made till the end of time, existed from all eternity in the mind and counsels of God. However, they did not appear. But God spake; the Eternal Father expressed His will. All that before was void became material, all that before was without shape became possessed of size, and

form, and order. The things which are seen were then made of things which do not, which did not, appear. There was, as we should say, nothing; there was acting on that nothing no visible power, no hand, but a Will and a Voice. That invisible power, out of that invisible nothingness made all the things which the generations of men have seen, as well as all that has still been invisible to them all. Here is, I say, an illustration of the working and nature of Faith. For in another world, in the world of spiritual things, in the world the eye of your immortal soul gazes on, there is nothing; there is a dark void. Then Faith exerts itself, the darkness is dark no longer; light is shed abroad in the heart, and on all the inner world ; light is followed by order, form, beauty, life. Faith is a creating power. As the Will and Word of God out of nothing and perpetual night made the worlds to uprise, which had nevertheless existed eternally in the knowledge and power of God; so Faith in a sense creates, at any rate makes to appear for us those verities of the eternal which have ever existed within us and around us; it makes for us the realities of the world to come out of things which hitherto have not appeared to us, and to them who have no faith do not appear.

And then the Creation is not only a grand picture and explanation of the way Faith works, but it is also the first topic on which Faith can exercise itself. Here is the world around us; nay, here am I myself. Whence came it? whence came I? What is to be the end of all? Brethren, with the Bible in our