but filling and peopling it with forms and substances having an inherent worth and virtue. Such a man is a living witness to a world out of sight, a world as real and a thousand times as permanent as the visible. So far he is on the side of Christ and the gospel, for he avows the reality of a world unseen.
Bring it down to our own common life. What supreme issues we decide in faith ! The battle is risked on the testimony of a single spy. We entrust ourselves on the great pathless ocean, because we have faith in the man at the wheel and in the man who is on the outlook at the masthead. Think of life without the element of faith and trust — fathers without faith in wives and mothers; brothers and sisters without mutual faith. It would mean that there could be no such thing as love, for love always presupposes implicit faith. We actually measure the character of men by the quality of their faith. We see a man who believes in goodness, and we say : He is a good man. He suspects and doubts the goodness of his fellows ; we suspect and doubt him. Is it not clear that faith is not an experience relating to religion alone ? It is no strange peculiar thing superimposed on man by priests and preachers, but the very principle by which we live from day to day.
I love to see my children trustful Of the best things from my hand ;
Never doubting me, nor curious All to know and understand.
For trust is nobler far than knowledge,
Faith than sight, a hundredfold: One the coward shows, the other
Both for good and ill makes bold.
And so 'tis sure the Heavenly Father,
Who His children's welfare plans With a changeless love, and wisdom
More consummate far than man's,
Eejoices most in those who trust Him,
Leaning simply on His love. These His best things here discover.
And will win the best above.^
2. There is a special sense in which the Christian walks by faith. — St. Paul was not thinking of a world of poetry or history or * T. Crawford, fforae Serenae, 61.
2 COR. V. 7 139
philosophy, when he wrote the words, " We walk by faith." St. Paul's world out of sight was not a world of magnitude or multi- tude, of beauty as such, or of wonder as such, or of power or wisdom or charity in the abstract. For him the invisible was a Person, the combination and concentration of the great and good, the true and the beautiful in whom are all things, and we in Him.
The Christian's activities and serviceableness are from one side perfectly natural, as he lives in true contact with the waking realities of human hfe. But from another side they are super- natural all the while, for the regenerate man is supernaturally conditioned and related. He is joined to Him who is invisible, and the union has to do with his whole being. He lives his life in the flesh by faith in the Son of God, who loved him and gave Himself for him. He perseveres as seeing Him whom yet he has not seen, but whom he shall yet see as He is. He thinks so highly of the present because of the eternal, to which it is as the seed-grain is to the summer harvest.
So the Christian walks by faith. Take out of his walk his faith, which is the very antithesis to credulity, and the difference for him will be practical indeed. Into the now formless void will disappear not only the fair idea of the things unseen, but the very substance, the very essence, of the noblest motive to the willing service of man on earth, and to a reverent jealousy over the duties of to-day. We walk by faith. And such a life is the one life fully worth living. Such a walk is the one walk that moves in true liberty along true certainty, making for a real goal.
^ Faith is a certitude without proofs. Being a certitude, it is an energetic principle of action. Being without proof, it is the contrary of science. Hence its two aspects and its two effects. Is its point of departure intelligence? No, thought may shake or strengthen faith; it cannot produce it. Is its origin in the will ? No, good- will may favour it, ill-will may hinder it, but no one believes by will, and faith is not a duty. Faith is a sentiment, for it is a hope ; it is an instinct, for it precedes all outward instruction. The need of faith never leaves us. It is the postulate of a higher truth which is to bring all things into harmony. It is the stimulus of research ; it holds out to us the reward, it points us to the goal.^
* AmieVs Journal (trans, by Mrs. Humphry Ward), 192.
I40 WALKING BY FAITH
^ That which in lifeless things ennobles them by seeming to indicate life, ennobles higher creatures by indicating the exaltation of their earthly vitality into a Divine vitality ; and raising the life of sense into the life of faith : faith, whether we receive it in the sense of adherence to resolution, obedience to law, regard- fulness of promise, in which from all time it has been the test, as the shield, of the true being and life of man ; or in the still higher sense of trustfulness in the presence, kindness, and word of God, in which form it has been exhibited under the Christian dispensa- tion. For whether, in one or other form, — whether the faithful- ness of men whose path is chosen and portion fixed, in the following and receiving of that path and portion, as in the Thermopylae camp ; or the happier faithfulness of children in the good giving of their Father, and of subjects in the conduct of their King, as in the " Stand still and see the salvation of God " of the Eed Sea shore, there is rest and peacefulness, the " stand- ing still," in both, the quietness of action determined, of spirit unalarmed, of expectation unimpatient: beautiful even when based only, as of old, on the self-command and self-possession, the persistent dignity or the uncalculating love, of the creature ; but more beautiful yet when the rest is one of humility instead of pride, and the trust no more in the resolution we have taken, but in the hand we hold.^