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Himself, for that would really be setting forth His created mani- festation as more trustworthy than the Divine reality.
Neither would He bid them practise a double faith, believing in God and believing in Himself. Such a command would imply the insufficiency of believing in God. We are not to believe in God as an abstract object, and in Christ as a collateral object ; not in God as an eternal object, and in Christ as a distinct object more available as being within the reach of our natural senses.
We are to believe in God with a supreme all-absorbing faith, and because we do so, we are to believe in Christ as the mani- festation of His eternal love, not separate, collateral, instrumental, but identical, co-essential, indissolubly one with Himself. The belief which we have in God will be the measure of our true behef in Christ. As God is independent of all outward circum- stance, so are we to believe in Christ with an entire independence of all outward circumstance. The events of the world do not shake our belief in God. Neither must they shake our belief in Christ.
1. Faith in God implies an act of the will. — Faith in God is a moral act ; it is not an emotion, an impression, the result of con- siderations which act upon a man from without ; it is an act in which he exercises moral choice. To have faith we must will to have it. This is not to say that there can be a true faith apart from reasonable grounds of faith. But these grounds may exist, they may be apparent, and yet faith may be absent, because the temper and spirit of the man make him reluctant to exert his will, or because he misconceives the nature of the act. Men con- found faith and opinion ; even in opinion a man's moral habits and tendencies count for a great deal ; and we often predict what a man's opinions will be from what we know of his character. But in the formation of opinion the will has no direct function except to compel the intellect to investigate the facts by which opinion should be determined. In faith the case is wholly differ- ent. When the facts which should command faith are present and seen, faith may be withheld. Faith is an act of the will; and if we suppose that we shall come to believe in God and in Christ as the result of external forces which compel belief, we shall not believe at all. And when faith, resting on adequate
ST. JOHN XIV. I 45
grounds, is assaulted by doubt, the doubt must be met by a resolute decision.
^ No man can ever estimate the power of the will. It is a part of the Divine nature, all of a piece with the power of crea- tion. We speak of God's fiat. " Fiat lux et hix erat " (Let light be and light was). Man has his fiat. The achievements of history have been the choices, the determinations, the creations of the human will.^
2. Belief in God precedes helief in Christ. — Manifestly, every- body must believe in God before he can believe in Jesus Christ in any deep sense ; for to say that " Jesus is the Son of God " already implies a belief in God. This was clearly true of the Christian converts from among the Jews, who were already worshippers of Jehovah ; and it was true also, though to a less extent, of the Greeks, as St. Paul recognized in his famous speech at Athens ; and it remains true of the converts from heathendom to-day. In the mind of all men there is some recognition of a Creator Spirit, with whom they are led to identify the Spirit of Jesus. And so the progress of belief is logically from the first article of the Creed to the second, from belief in God the Father and Creator to belief in Him whom the Father sent. At the same time, the belief in Jesus at once reacts upon the belief in God. The heathen convert, though he may employ the same word for God as before, has very dijfferent thoughts about Him ; he is taught to believe that the holiness and loving-kindness of Jesus are the holiness and loving-kindness of the Creator God ; and even the pious Jew gained a new insight into what these great qualities meant — the mercy and truth which he had always held to be the attributes of Jehovah. The two beliefs therefore go together. First, I learn to believe in God the Father, who has made me, and all the world ; secondly, in God the Son, who has redeemed me, and all mankind.
^ It would hardly be an exaggeration to say that modern Christians have inverted the order of the text. They believe in Christ, and therefore they believe in God. Indeed, this would seem to be the inevitable order of discipleship. Christ calls men to Himself. " Come unto me," " Follow me," and in obedience to His summons men come also to God ; but Christian Apologetic is
^ M. D. Babcock, Thoughts/or Every-Day Living, 1.
46 SECRET OF THE UNTROUBLED HEART
concerned not with disciples, as such, but with those who are not disciples, but, at most, friendly inquirers. Therefore the order of reason is the order of Apologetic. First Theism, then Christianity. " Ye believe in God, believe also in me." Every Theist is to that extent Christian, that is to say, Christianity is the logical inference from his Theistic belief. A Christianity which violates Theism is a contradiction in terms.^