1 Letter from Ruskin to his father in E. T. Cook's Life of Ruskin, i. 271.
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If Faith is that strong buoyant confidence in God and in His love which gives energy and spirit to do right without doubt or despondency. Where God sees that, He sees the spring and fountain out of which all good springs : He sees, in short, the very life of Christ begun, and He reckons that to be righteous- ness ; just as a small perennial fountain in Gloucestershire is the Thames, though it is as yet scarcely large enough to float a schoolboy's boat ; and just as you call a small seedling not bigger than a little almond peeping above the ground, an oak ; for the word "justify" means not to be made righteous, but to reckon or account righteous.1
If I am not sure that we are much the better for our attempted definitions of Faith. Baxter connects it with the doctrine of the mystical union ; Lampe defines it as a willingness to be saved by Christ ; Halyburton and Owen as a cordial acceptance of the offer; Sandeman as simple belief in simple testimony. Well, a man is sometimes very little the better for a definition, and all these perplex as well as enlighten. But " none perish that Him trust " — none perish that Him trust.2
(2) Faith is also trust in God as a Father. — If there is a word more expressive of Christian character than any other, it is this one: trust — trust in God. It is the secret source of all peace and serenity. It will comfort and sustain when nothing else can. It gives the child of God the delightful assurance that all his trials are disguised blessings, the appointment of a Father's wisdom, and the infliction of a Father's love. And death itself becomes the security and enlargement of life, a training for that holy intimacy with Himself which is to constitute the blessedness of the heavenly world. " Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him." The bringing of good out of evil is His grand prerogative. He permits the evil in order to produce the good. The Christian's character is formed more from his trials than from his enjoyments. The picture would have no beauty or effect without shade.
If Christ's faith in His Father was as conspicuous as His faith in the mission He had to accomplish, of which He said on the cross, " It is finished ! " His vindication He left entirely in His Father's hands, when He yielded up His spirit, in a complete surrender of self, saying, "Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit!" I am not forgetting that He was the everlasting
1 F. W. Robertson, in Life and Letters, 335.
8 "Rabbi" Duncan, in Memoir of John Duncan, 414.
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Word, the only begotten of the Father, when I speak thus, but I wish to remind you that He really became man — having limited Himself, having " emptied " Himself, as St. Paul said, that He might become the true Brother of humanity, the Son of Man, sharing with us, in everything save sin, the necessity and the blessedness of faith.1
K The faith of our time has had to pass through fiery furnaces of tribulation. It has survived the shock of losing its Infallible Church. It has survived the shock of losing its Infallible Book. It has surrendered, at the bidding of science, that latest voice of God — the Garden of Eden, and the world made in six days, and the dream of man's primal innocence. It presumes no longer to penetrate dark mysteries. It cannot reconcile Foreknowledge and Free Will. It cannot reconcile the apparent cruelty of nature with the lovingness of God. It understands neither heaven nor hell. It has learnt to trust, humbly and without reserve, in Christ. "Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed." That surely is the truest faith of all the ages, to have lived in an atmosphere of unbelief, to have faced and endured all the assaults of modern doubt, and still to trust "in afflictions, in necessities, in distresses, by honour and dis- honour, by evil report and good report, as dying, and behold we live, as chastened and not killed " — still, with deeper intensity than ever, to believe in God and Christ and Eternal Life.
I little see, I little know,
Yet can I fear no ill; He who hath guided me till now
Will be my leader still.
No burden yet was on me laid
Of trouble or of care, But He my trembling step hath stayed,
And given me strength to bear.
I came not hither of my will
Or wisdom of mine own : That Higher Power upholds me still,
And still must bear me on.
I knew not of this wondrous earth,
Nor dreamed what blessings lay Beyond the gates of human birth
To glad my future way.
1 A. Rowland, The Exchanged Crowns, 33.
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And what beyond this life may be
As little I divine — What love may wait to welcome me,
What fellowships be mine.
I know not what beyond may lie,
But look, in humble faith, Into a larger life to die,