HABAKKUK n. 4 381
Hebrew term indeed is much larger than faith, and carries in itself the idea of firmness, steadfastness, faithfulness. It is used of the holding up of Moses' hands by Aaron and Hur (Exod. xvii. 12) : "his hands were steadiness"; of the stability of the times (Is. xxxiii. 6); of the trustworthiness of one in office (2 Kings xxii. 7) ; of an office as a trust (1 Chron. ix. 22, 26) ; in con- nexion with righteousness (Prov. xii. 17); and of right conduct in general. The basis of its meaning is the verb to " believe," and in its many connexions to^believe in God. The root-idea of the noun is belief in, and faithfulness exercised toward, God in true whole-hearted obedience.
3. We are now in a position to appreciate the meaning of this great prophetic utterance. A righteous one, exercising true faith- fulness, shall live, shall endure ; and (to add the Hebrew idea) shall endure affliction and reproaches with patience and long- suffering. The righteous man through his faithfulness shall live perpetually.
Here then is the oracle to the troubled prophet and the trembling nation. It has two sides. The first is the old law. " The soul that sinneth, it shall die " ; more than that, it shall die because of its sin, for " the wages of sin is death " ; still more, it is potentially and in reality dead already, for sin is death. You see a guilty nation apparently triumphing. It carries its own sentence of death. " But the righteous man shall live by his fidelity." Eighteousness may be hated, persecuted, maligned, slandered, imprisoned, beaten, burnt, crucified over and over again. That is in one form or another the lot of righteousness on earth. Nevertheless, righteousness is life, sin is death. That was essentially the oracle of Habakkuk, to Judah, and to all mankind.
The words came to Habakkuk as the solution of many dark and difficult problems ; it gave him strength for the battle of his life, and was to him, as the " prophetic word " has ever been, as a light shining in the darkness; but, unless we ascribe to him a foresight differing in kind as well as in degree from anything that Scripture warrants us in connecting with a prophet's work, we cannot think of him as seeing far into its future history. Not for him was the vision of all the wondrous destiny of those wondrous words — how they were to be the starting-point of a new stage in
382 LIFE BY FAITH
the spiritual life of mankind, the glad tidings of great joy to myriads of penitent and contrite hearts, — kindling in the heart of St. Paul the fire which was never to be extinguished, — stirring the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews to his long muster-roll of the heroes of a faith which overcomes the world, — casting a ray of brightness even across the dreariness of the Talmud — starting ever and anon, in Augustine and Luther, and a thousand lesser prophets, as on a fresh career of victory, conquering and to conquer, — the trumpet-call of the Church's warfare, the watch- word of mighty controversies, the articulus stantis vel cadentis Ecclesim. Yes, in the very van of that goodly fellowship of preachers was that prophet of whom we now know so little, whom we have almost lost out of our sight in the great procession of his followers. The first preacher of the truth of justification by faith was not Luther, or Augustine, or Paul, but the prophet Habakkuk.
T| In answer to an inquiry from his brother Eobert as to his opinion of Mr. J. H. Newman's recent work on Justification, Bishop Wilberforce wrote : " The living faith which is the formal cause of our Justification is a compound, an assent of the Under- standing to the truth of what God reveals and a co-existing going forth of the Will approving of and choosing it. Now this is wholly independent of good works. Let time indeed be given and this principle will necessarily produce Good Works, but still by a necessary accident. It is not, I mean, the future production of Good Works which makes the difference between the one and the other, but the present difference of the Will. The man may die before he has had time to produce one Good Work, yet his living Faith is not made to have been dead, by Christ. You show me two seeds ; one is a dead seed, the other a living. I cannot see the difference ; so I say, ' Plant them and then the living seed will grow ' ; but it is not this after-growing which constitutes its life. It was just as much alive before it began to grow. The living principle within made it unlike the dead seed : only my infirmity prevented my being able to detect it. So in Faith. The living Faith, before the least possibility of working, is wholly different from the dead Faith, and God sees this ; and the man in whom it is, is freely and as much justified as if he had worked ever so much." x
^ However he may have stated it in the old familiar forms of bargain, this was Luther's real doctrine of justification by faith. 1 A. R. Ashwell, Life of Samuel Wilberforce, i. 121.