I know the plants that bear the noisome fruit
Of burning and of ashes and of gall —
From God's heart torn, rootless to man's they cling.
3. Faith remains as of old the condition of the highest life. To the prophet the supreme idea of life is safety, preservation from peril. To the Apostle the supreme idea is entire devotion to the will of God. He alone lives who can, in his measure, say after Christ, " My meat is to do the will of him that sent me." It is that life which a man shall live who has, and maintains, a living faith in God. And nothing else but faith can possibly inspire or sustain that life. A living faith maintains the higher life of righteousness, and the higher life of righteousness upholds, and ever reinvigorates, the living faith. Faith cannot but work out righteousness. Eighteousness cannot but make demands that ennoble faith.
(1) We are not to suppose that faith is a supernatural faculty which we cannot exercise until it has been imparted to us by God in some mysterious manner. Faith is of course God's gift, but it is bestowed upon us just as naturally as memory is bestowed, or the gift of reason. It is one of the normal faculties of our man- hood, for the exercise of which we are responsible. Were it not so, Christ could never have upbraided His disciples with their unbelief. The arguments used to present faith in any other light rest largely on a mistaken interpretation of Eph. ii. 8. It is salvation, not faith, which is declared in that verse to be " the gift of God."
Tf Perhaps if God's existence had been one of those things of which formal proof coukl be given to the world, the acknowledged fact would have lost its interest. It would have killed individual inquiry. . . . We should have lost all those touching and noble associations which gather round the name of faith, and should have had instead a cold science — common property, and so appropriated by none. As it is, each man has to prove the fact for himself. It is the great adventure, the great romance of every soul — this finding of God. Though so many travellers have crossed the ocean before us, and bear witness of the glorious
388 LIFE BY FAITH
continent beyond, each soul for itself has to repeat the work of a Columbus, and discover God afresh. And this can indeed be done; but intellectual argument is not the sole nor the main means of apprehension. At best it prepares the way. Moral purification is equally necessary. Then spiritual effort, deter- mined, concentrated, renewed in spite of failure — calm and strong prayers in the Name of Christ — enable the believer to say, like Jacob after he had wrestled with the Angel, — " I have seen God face to face, and my life is preserved." 1
(2) Christian faith is an attitude of the soul which wholly honours God. It takes Him simply and implicitly at His word. It rests upon His promises. It asks no questions. The fact that God has spoken is sufficient ; the soul trusts, and in its trust is again at peace with God. Man's oneness with God was ruptured at first by unbelief. It was through the door of doubt that sin entered into the world, and death by sin. " Yea ; hath God said — ? " Faith reverses the subtle whisper of the tempter and trustfully accepts the word of the Living God — "Yea; God hath said"; thus faith speaks, and there faith rests.
TJ The late Master of Balliol (Dr. Jowett) asked the question, " Is it possible to feel a personal attachment to Christ such as is described by Thomas a Kempis ? I think that it is impossible, and contrary to human nature, that we should be able to con- centrate our thoughts on a person scarcely known to us, who lived 1800 years ago." Discipular experience from St. Paul downwards, through the centuries, acknowledges that it is possible, and finds the experience is proportionate to the culture of the spiritual nature and the enjoyment of the atmosphere of God and the Christ, who is at the centre of it. The testimony of the centuries corroborates Dr. Dale's view, " that faith in Christ is trust in a Person, not belief in a book; that the ultimate foundation of faith is personal knowledge of Christ, and its originating cause the personal testimony of those who in our own time, and before it, have trusted in Christ and have found their faith verified in spiritual experience." This statement is true to the heart of things and to the fundamental elements of spiritual and discipular experience. Christ is as real to the Christian experience as the air we breathe.2
(3) It is by such faith that men live. The life of our spirits
1 A. J. Mason, The Faith of the Gospel.
2 D. Butler, Tlwmas a Kempis, 75.
HABAKKUK n. 4 389
is a gift from God, the Father of spirits, and He has chosen to declare that unless we trust to Him for life, and ask Him for life, He will not bestow it upon us. The life of our bodies He in His mercy keeps up, although we forget Him ; the life of our souls He will not keep up ; therefore, for the sake of our spirits, even more than of our bodies, we must live by faith. If we wish to be loving, pure, manly, noble, we must ask these excellent gifts of God, who is Himself infinite love and purity, wisdom and noble- ness. If we wish for everlasting life, from whom can we obtain it but from God, who is the fulness of eternal life itself ? If we wish for forgiveness for our faults and failings, where are we to get it but from God, who is boundless love and pity, and who has revealed to us His boundless love and pity in the form of a man, Jesus Christ, the Saviour of the world ? And to go a step farther ; it is by faith in Christ we must live — in Christ, a man like ourselves, yet God blessed for ever. For it is a certain truth, that men cannot believe in God or trust in Him unless they can think of Him as a man. This was the reason why the poor heathen made themselves idols in the form of men, that they might have something like themselves to worship; and those among them who would not worship idols almost always ended in fancying that God was either a mere notion or a mere part of this world, or else that He sat up in heaven neither knowing nor caring what happened upon earth. But we, to whom God has given the glorious news of His gospel, have the very Person to worship whom all the heathen were searching after and could not find — one who is "very God," infinite in love, wisdom, and strength, and yet " very man," made in all points like ourselves, but without sin ; so that we have not a High Priest who cannot be touched with the feeling of our infirmities, but one who is able to help those who are tempted, because He was Himself tempted like us, and overcame by the strength of His own perfect will, of His own perfect faith. By trusting in Him, and acknowledging Him in every thought and action of our lives, we shall be safe ; for it is written, " The just shall live by faith."