The writer, then, is not " preaching the Gospel " ; he is not making known to the ignorant what they have not heard, or urging on the wicked and impenitent what they have neglected ; he is not proclaiming pardon, mercy, reconciliation, and so on, to the miserable and the lost ; he is contemplating persons of another sort, and doing a different kind of thing altogether. He assumes that the persons he addresses are believers — that they have faith, " like precious faith " with himself. They do not need, therefore, to have the Gospel "preached" to them, made known, pressed on their acceptance, or to be themselves " besought " and entreated " to be reconciled to God." They are past all that. They have heard the Gospel; have believed it; and are recognized as partakers of that faith in " the righteousness of our God and Saviour Jesus Christ," to which, in Scripture, the justification of the sinner is attached. Hence, you will observe, they are not exhorted to have faith, — or to " add " faith to anything. They have it ; and, as having it, they are exhorted to " add " to it all the other things.
^ If you want flowers, you must have roots, and the roots must be placed in a favourable soil. Any gardener will tell you that certain plants need a particular kind of mould if they are ever to be anything better than sickly-looking weeds ; and people who neglect these precautions, or try to coerce nature into their
2 PETER I. 5-7 159
methods, have to pay for it next summer by having no flowers. Just so there is one soil, and only one, in which temperance and patience and godliness will take root and flourish, and that is a heart that has trusted Christ as Eedeemer and bowed to Him as King and Lord.^
2. By faith, the writer means faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. The trustful apprehension of God's unspeakable gift, of the mercy which rose over the world like a bright dawn when the Eedeemer came — that is what he intends by the word. This is worth mentioning ; for it is not uncommon to speak of faith abstractly, as no more than a hopeful, positive, serious way of regarding life. But when the New Testament writers say "faith" they mean, quite definitely, faith in contact with its proper object, Christ, and becoming through that contact a strong triumphant thing.
This faith is more than an intellectual assent to a speculative truth or an historical fact. It is more than credit to any fact, or assent to any truth. It is an act of loving devotion to a person in answer to His claims upon the heart, the response to His manifold love of grateful devotion, the reception of His offered pardon with renunciation of the forgiven sin, the consecration of the life to His cause, and a steadfast and open avowal of discipleship. Such a faith by no means excludes definite views of Christ's nature and work, — whence He came and whither He goes ; what He must be as Divine or as human, — but it enters into the human soul and into human society as a living power, by its joyful and loving realiza- tion of Christ as the master of the heart who, though He was dead, yet lives, and, behold ! is alive for evermore ; but who is yet as near and as sympathizing to every disciple as when He spoke words of personal tenderness to the weakest and the most discon- solate, or wept tears of sympathy at Lazarus' grave.
^ On January 16, 1894, Dr. Temple (then Bishop of London) gave a striking lecture to the clergy of the diocese at Sion College on " Faith." He began by referring at some length to a conversa- tion upon Justification by Faith which he, when a young scholar at Balliol, once had with " Ideal " Ward, then a Fellow of the College and considerably his senior. Ward quoted the definition of faith given by Coleridge in the beginning of his Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit : " Faith subsists in the synthesis of the reason
^H. R. Mackintosh, Life on God's Plan, 231,
i6o THE UNFOLDING OF CHARACTER
and the individual will," a definition which the Bishop took as the text of his lecture.
It was not (he owned) a definition that would have been accepted in the last century, nor one which was generally to be found in the writers of Christian evidences ; but, while it had been assumed that faith was the act of the intellect only, he contended that to make it merely an intellectual act would be to lower the nature of faith itself. Such a theory was, he said, inconsistent with the nature of man, between whose various faculties and powers a sharp distinction could not really be drawn. The tendency to separate the intellectual and the will forces was, he felt sure, a mistaken one. The intellect could not act in its fulness without the will, nor could the will act in its fulness without the intellect, nor indeed could either act without the affections. But, still further, the tendency of this attempted separation of the intellect from the will, and the assigning of faith to the intellect entirely, was always towards laying the whole stress of faith upon external evidence. The intellect taken by itself dealt with external evidence more easily than any other, and consequently, wherever that notion of faith had either consciously or uncon- sciously prevailed, there had been always a tendency to base faith entirely upon miracles, and to make them the one conclusive proof of the truth of God's revelation, or especially of that part of His revelation from which we derived our Christian knowledge. That, however, was no sure foundation ; for it was a resting, not upon miracles as the real basis, but upon the historical evidence of those miracles ; and there, of course, there necessarily came in the fact that the judgment upon miracles belonged entirely to the ordinary intellect. The man who was the best judge of such evidence was not necessarily a good man or a spiritual man ; he was simply an intellectual man who could balance one kind of testimony against another.