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contrasts the present condition of the Christian who has to live the daily life by seeing the invisible with two other experiences — one past, one future — each of which may be called walking by sight. The disciples walked by sight during the earthly ministry of the Saviour. They lived the daily life during those three wonder- ful years by the help of visible shape and form. " While I was with them in the world," He says Himself in the great prayer, " I kept them in thy name." The personal influence, the ascendancy of perfect goodness, the motive of reverential love, something more powerful still, mysteriously hinted in His own saying : " The Spirit dwelleth with you, and shall be in you," secured their walk during those years at least from levity, passion, or sin, though it very imperfectly enlightened their understanding, and left them liable to the first gust of temptation the moment it was withdrawn. Still, to walk by sight, when that sight was the sight of Jesus Christ, was a wonderful privilege while it could be theirs, St. Paul himself had never known this kind of life. He was not one of the Twelve. His sight of Christ had been but for a moment, though it left an indelible impression upon his life. When he said, " We walk not by sight," he probably had in his mind a walk not past, done with, but a walk future, and not yet possible. The passage in which the text is embedded is a passage of expectation. He is reconciling himself and his readers to a present condition of pilgrimage and homelessness by the prospect of a beautiful and magnificent change. He seems to say in the text, " We walk not yet, but we shall walk, by sight."
^ To credit ordinary and visible objects is not faith, but per- suasion. Some believe the better for seeing Christ's sepulchre ; and when they have seen the Ked Sea doubt not of the miracle. Now contrarily, I bless myself, and am thankful, that I lived not in the days of miracles : that I never saw Christ and His disciples. I would not have been one of those Israelites that passed the Eed Sea; nor one of Christ's patients on whom He wrought His wonders : then had my faith been thrust upon me ; nor should I enjoy that greater blessiug being pronounced to all that believe and saw not. 'Tis an easy and necessary belief, to credit what our eye and sense hath examined. I believe He was dead, and buried, and rose again ; and desire to see Him in His glory, rather than to contemplate Him in His cenotaph or sepulchre. Nor is this much to believe : as we have reason, we owe this faith unto
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history : they only had the advantage of a bold and noble faith who lived before His Coming, who, upon obscure prophecies and mystical types, could raise a belief, and expect apparent impossibilities.^
IL
By Faith.
1. There is a sense in which every mem walks ly faith. — As there is a sense in which no man, absolutely no man, walks or can walk by sight, so there is a sense in which every man walks and must walk by faith. In making faith everything in the Christian life, our Lord merely elevated and illuminated a natural principle into that which is above nature. Every man who is not a fool or a madman, in some sense, walks and must walk by faith. The monstrous and shameful avowal, " I believe in nothing that I do not see," though it has been made before now on an infidel platform, is the mere babbling of idiocy. The rough seaman who once answered the saying on the instant by the question, " Don't you believe in the wind ? " caught the point of the fallacy and saved philosophy and theology the trouble of a reply. Every investment of the money hoarded, every engagement of the worldling, every project of the sensualist, is made on the faith of a to-morrow. Each one of these, in a miserable way, walks by faith. But, as before, in speaking of sight, so now again of faith, we may notice approaches and approximations, however far they may be from an attainment. A man walks by faith in proportion as he lives above sense. A man who in any degree controls appetite, keeps under his body, lives soberly and chastely, what- ever the motive, so far walks by faith. A man who refuses to judge the world's judgment, forms his own opinion and holds to it, expresses an independent mind upon things right and wrong in private or public, more or less certainly walks by faith in doing so. A man who studies deeply, who dwells much in philosophy and history, keeps company with the great minds and souls of the past, has a real sympathy with beautiful thoughts of the dead as well as of the living, walks by faith in a more definite, because a positive and not a negative, way ; not leaving vacant, if that were possible, the space redeemed from the sensual and the sensible, ^ Sir Thomas Browne, Beligio Medici, sec. 9,
138 WALKING BY FAITH