The beckoniug finger biddiug me forego The fellowship, the converse, and the wine,
The songs, the festal glow !
And ah, to know not, while with friends I sit, And while the purple joy is passed about,
Whether 'tis ampler day divinelier lit Or homeless night without:
And whether, stepping forth, my soul shall see New prospects, or fall sheer — a blinded thing !
There is, 0 grave, thy hourly victory, And there, 0 death, thy sting.^
3. The very ordering of the phrasing of the text is suggestive of the truth it contains. The text breaks up into three distinctive and primary parts : " I know him " . . . " whom I have believed " ..." and I am persuaded that he is able to guard that which I have committed unto him against that day." The middle term is explanatory of the two extremes ; say rather that the middle term is the cause, of which the two extremes are the effects ; that the middle is the germ, of which the extremes are the fruits. We begin with belief, and we pass to knowledge and persuasion ; we begin with faith, and we advance to experience and assurance. " I know him " is a fruit : " I am persuaded " is a fruit : " whom I have believed " is the seed from which they have their birth.
I.
St. Paul's Faith.
•* Him whom I have believed."
1. The Object of St. Paul's faith was not a thing, but a Person. It was a belief, not in a religion, but in a Eedeemer ; a faith, not
' William Watsoa, Collected Poei/is, SI.
190 THE PRACTICE OF ASSURANCE
in Christianity, but in Christ ; a trust, not in a plan of salvation, but in a Saviour ; not in a creed, but in a Christ ; and not a Christ only, but the Christ, the Christ of actual fact, the Christ of Scripture, the " God Man," as set forth in the gospel, incarnate, atoning, risen, ascended, glorified. It was faith in Christ as a person ; a trust of himself as a being to Christ as a Being. And hence he does not here say, " I know what I have believed," but he says, " I know him whom I have believed." And he does not even say as he might, " in whom," but directly " whom."
^ You may tear out the person of Mahomet from Mahome- tanism ; and even from Buddhism — in spite of the great extent to which Buddhists have deified the master — you may tear out the person of the Buddha, and the religion remains intact ; here the teaching is everything, the person of the teacher nothing, or next to nothing. But tear out the person of Christ from Christianity, and what have you left ? Certainly nothing that we can recognize as Christianity. Christianity is not, like its rivals, a mere body of doctrine about God and human duty, which would be just the same whoever had first preached it, or if nothing were known as to the way in which it came into the world. Christian faith is the personal knowledge of a personal Saviour.^
^ An anecdote I have heard of Bengel's last hours, illustrating his microscopic way of observing the very words of his Greek Testament, makes one almost smile. When he was dying, he quoted those well-known words of the apostle, in the immediate prospect of his death by Nero, " I know whom I have believed," etc., and then said to the bystanders, "The apostle (you see) wouldn't let even a preposition come in between himself and his Lord ; for he doesn't say, * I know upon whom ' (g/'s h), but ' I know whom I have believed ' {ofba yap (^ •iri'jrioTtvxa) — the eye of his faith resting on the glorious object to whom he had ever trusted his all." ^
^ I remember a simple story that twined its clinging tendril fingers about my heart. It was of a woman whose years had ripened her hair, and sapped her strength. She was a true saint in her long life of devotion to God. She knew the Bible by heart, and would repeat long passages from memory. But as the years came the strength went, and with it the memory gradually went too, to her grief. She seemed to have lost almost wholly the power to recall at will what had been stored away. But one
^ N. E. Swann, I^ew Lights on the Old Faith, 60. 2 W. G. Blaikie, David Broim, D.D., LL.D., \i7.
2 TIMOTHY T. T2 191
precious bit still stayed. She would sit by the big sunny window of the sitting-room in her home, repeating over that one bit, as though chewing a delicious titbit, "I know whom I have believed, and am persuaded that he is able to keep that which I have com- mitted unto him against that day," By and by part of that seemed to slip its hold, and she would quietly be repeating, " that which I have committed to him." The last few weeks, as the ripened old saint hovered about the borderland between this and the spirit world, her feebleness increased. Her loved ones would notice her lips moving, and thinking she might be needing some creature comfort, they would go over and bend down to listen for her request. And time and again they found the old saint re- peating over to herself one word, over and over again, the same one word, " Him — Him — Him." She had lost the whole Bible but one word. But she had the whole Bible in that one word.^