experience, swift as an arrow, sharp as a two-edged sword, in the controversy which he was then waging, was now seen in its bearing upon the wider questions of the religious history of man- kind. The history of the Gentile world showed that the witness of the eternal power and Godhead in the things that are seen was not enough, that even the law written in men's hearts was not enough to save them from a fathomless degradation. The history of Israel showed that even the oracles of God, and the covenants and the promises, even the voice on Sinai and the word that spoke by the prophets, were not enough to raise men from hy- pocrisy, formalism, selfishness. For both something more was needed, and that something was found in the revelation of the Divine character as seen in the humanity of Christ. So it was that the thoughts of the Apostle rose to the height of that great argument. Among the marvellous fruits of the seed sown by Habakkuk, cast like seed-corn upon the waters, to be found again after many days, we may place the Epistle to the Eomans.
^| We do not recognize all that Paul means when he describes the Christian experience unless we lay the emphasis on the Divine grace and the human faith. While faith calls into exercise, and free and full exercise, the whole personality of man, it is not understood as Paul understood it, if it is regarded as a task to be done by man's strenuous effort. If faith were this, salvation would be of works, and grace would not be grace. The stress in Paul's doctrine is on the objective facts of Christ's Crucifixion and Eesurrection ; the subjective states of being crucified and risen with Christ are the necessary effects of these facts, where a man submits himself to Christ. Faith is not a productive, but a receptive energy. It is the greater personality of Christ which inspires and sustains that dependence on, com- munion with, and submission to, Him which results in a man's moral transformation. In these days, when on the one hand the Jesus of history is recedirjg into the distant past, and on the other the Christ of faith is being sublimated into a moral and religious ideal, the identity of both needs to be insisted on to make the one present and the other real. It is the real presence of the personal Saviour and Lord which alone explains Paul's own experience, and the experience which he assumed to be common to all believers. The moral passion and power of the Apostle can be recovered by the Christian Church to-day only as it recognizes the moral meaning of the Crucifixion and Resurrection of jer.-mal. — 25
386 LIFE BY FAITH
Christ, and reproduces that moral content in personal union with Him.1
2. Luther's one corner-stone of the Reformation, in opposition to the decrees, decretals, and bulls of Rome, was this text. In his interpretation of it, he did not read it, " The just by faith shall live," the man who is made just by his faith, but the one who is just, having been so made by God Himself, shall live, endure, through his belief and faith in God. Belief and faith in the Church, in popes and decrees, is ineffectual, does not make for endurance, for salvation, for eternal life. Luther's tremendous emphasis upon the main teaching of this text made it a kind of battle-cry of freedom among the German reformers.
Once enunciated, the doctrine spread rapidly ; faith as a grain of mustard-seed waxed a great tree ; the morsel of yeast leavened the whole lump. In the secular twentieth century it requires a slight effort of the imagination to realize what enthusiasm a purely religious idea might arouse in the sixteenth. That it did so is certain ; undoubtedly because multitudes were sick of the holiness of works offered them by the Church, and longed for a more spiritual religion. Though it may be admitted that the antithesis has often been exaggerated, nevertheless the popular idea remains roughly right — that the Reformation meant a move- ment from a mechanical to an individual and subjective con- ception of religion. It was the same need of doing away with externals and seeking an immediate relation to God that moved the mystics of the fourteenth century ; but Europe was not then ripe for the idea. The explanation of Luther's success where Tauler failed is partly found in the timely elements with which he combined his original thought. His own experience was but the nucleus around which was gathered all that was most vital in the thought of the age — the return to the Bible, to Augustine, and to mysticism, the protest against the sophistries of the Schoolmen and against the corruption of the Church, and a simpler, more individual relation of the soul to God. Above all, Martin Luther was fitted to be the prophet of his age because he had the most searching experience in what that age imperiously demanded — personal religion.
1 A. E. Gar vie, Studies of Paul aiid his Gospel, 185.
HABAKKUK n. 4 387
Lo, Lord, Thou know'st, I would not anything
That in the heart of God holds not its root;
Nor falsely deem there's any life at all
That doth in Him nor sleep nor shine nor sing;