manifestation; but which is an unbroken history of acts, and signs, and promises of holy saving love from the entrance of destroying sin until He, who, in the fulness of times, came to give His life for man, shall come again without sin unto salvation to take His own who have believed in Him unto Himself, that where He is they may be also. The believer's thoughts of the love of God in Christ Jesus are to draw food for reasoning and emotion from all the deeds and words of God's holy love of man, and His hatred of sin, and His grace of salvation, which make the world's history-all the assurances through which the fathers looked forward and saw the day of Christ afar off, and all the accomplishments and assurances through which Christians look back and also forward, when they let their hearts fill themselves with peace and joy and holy desire in beholding ever more and more how full the fountain was, and is, and is to be, that began to flow in Eden, and was so disclosed to sight in Calvary a fountain opened for sin and for uncleanness, and will be, in the incorruptible inheritance, a river that maketh glad the city of our God. The Lord, our Lord, who is the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever, is in all His eternal love to man, though especially in all His earthknown coming to save us, to be "ever before us." "Looking unto Him" is to be the condition of our life, abiding in Him, and having His words abiding in us-all "His words," from the first that opened hope to Adam, to the fullest appeal to behold and believe and come to the perfected work of salvation. The emotions of faith are consequently to be all that these thoughts of faith may bring when they are singly or in combination occupying the mind. And these active emotions are to deposit, as it were, permanent habitual feelings in the soul, as they pass over it in strength again and again; so that in like manner as innumerable matters of faith's thoughts lie in the believer's mind, prompt to awaken to constraining force upon any suggestion, or all combined have in their quiescent condition a controlling dominion over the processes of his intellect, a permanent body of emotions shall correspondingly possess the soul, and keep it in a constant union of the heart as well as of the thoughts to Him in whom he believes. We cannot describe by one or by any few words that habitual state of the believer's soul. We can only describe many active states into which it is excited to special emotions for the time towards Him who is its all in all. But we confine the meaning of faith when we call it trust, or when we call it by any single emotional act of the soul at all. emotion 11. It would be impossible to class the exercises of faith, No single which our Lord while on earth required of those who received sufficiently His gifts, under any definition which would give an intelligible descriptive. account of them all. Simple taking, as a matter of course, the certainty of what He said, was all the faith that took Peter to seek the tribute-money in the first fish's mouth he caught at Capernaum, and the disciples afterwards to find the colt tied and the man carrying water in the streets of Jerusalem. Reverential observance of whatever He might direct to be done in a difficulty, without looking for any particular kind of help, was the faith needed on the failure of wine at the Cana marriage, and suggested to the servants by His experienced mother. Thinking of Him as the sure and common Ruler of all things, was the faith He frequently rebuked His disciples for failing in-faith to walk upon the sea-to think of Him as the known Creator of food for thousands. Assurance of the existence in Him of this authority over all things was the faith not found in Israel, but found in the centurion of Capernaum, before whose eyes Jesus appeared the Master of all the influences of life as entirely and easily as when he, the master of soldiers, was in the way of saying to any one of them, "Do this,” and he did it. Assurance of His having superhuman mercifulness of heart, as well as superhuman power, was the "great" feature in the faith of the Syro-Phoenician mother-a strong vision of His compassionateness that could not be frightened away by sight of trial or discouragement. Such a beholding, with the ready eyes of the soul, of His characteristic goodness, as a thing above the ways of mankind as heaven is above the earth, was the general feature of the faith of those who came to be healed or saved by Him-the lepers breaking through all the restraints of religious authority to reach Him-mothers bringing their little children to Him—the blind calling after K Him in spite of all repression-friends of the incurable intruding at all hours, in all places, on all His occupations, with their peculiar distresses. An intense quietly-possessed thought of His peculiar friendship for them-a thought filling their hearts and making much of their life-was the faith that made Martha and Mary send to Him far away beyond Jordan so brief a message, even from their brother's deathbed—"Lord, behold, he whom thou lovest is sick." A thought as entirely possessed-no spasmodic imagination, but an accustomed thought of His almighty power to get help from heaven, if He should ask even a new life for their brother-was quietly spoken by them when Lazarus was dead. Through avenues of personal experience like these, diverse classes of thinkers on Jesus of Nazareth came to be able to think of Him by the description which the prophets had given of the Messiah— "the sent of God," "the one who should come," "bearing our griefs, carrying our sorrows"-the Saviour needed by mankind's life, whose coming should be "glad tidings to the poor." The bitter spiritual experience, the felt needs, of some here and there greater sinners than their brethren, received help to see also the forgiver of sins in Jesus, who was so evidently all else that the Messiah was to be; and these came to a faith liker the chief Christian looking of faith than the others. Yet trust would come short of describing the state of heart of the woman who was a sinner." Her feeling was an indescribable blessed peace-humility speechlessly thankful—a sense of being safe in Him, restored, healed, received again, God's prodigal child taken home. What was the faith of those persons inscribed in the roll of examples of faith in Hebrews xi.— the individuals we would hardly call religious-Samson and Jephthah, whose names surprise our conventional thoughts to read in the same catalogue with Abraham and Enoch? We cannot in our thoughts of those men's history associate with their faith the richer moral emotions of Christian or of the best Jewish times. Confined within a half-barbarous state of human life in the oppressed and desperate times of the Judges, their faith seems to have been an intensely present feeling of a personal connection with Israel's Jehovah for a particular end. Jephthah was an appointed wild-handed deliverer of Israel from Ammon, himself liker an Ishmaelite than an Israelite. Samson was the trustee of abnormal strength and intrepidity, to succour the Hebrews under Philistine servitude. elements plation of a person. 12. A common element of all faith's thoughts and emotions Common appears, however, in these illustrations of emotional think- of faith's ing. They all contemplate a person, and are attracted to Him, thoughtsand are full of Him. Faith does not think of God's power or wisdom, or Christ's miraculous greatness, but of Himself. What is the faith of daily sanctification described by John? "Who is he that overcometh the world but he that believeth that Jesus Christ is the Son of God?" What single emotion would we name as representing that believing? Different from trusting, or loving, or fearing, or hoping, it is a constant sight, and appreciation, and keeping hold of that great fact of our salvation, that our Redeemer, our Friend, He whom we are asked to love with heart and soul, and strength and mind, the speaker of peace to us, the desirous fellow-sufferer of our pains, who was straitened till He should be perfected in the endurance of our burden, is-JESUS THE SON OF GOD-that He is God who thus loved us. To be full of Him, absorbed in Him, taken up with living in Him, for Him, is the state of faith-looking unto Him, abiding in Him, and having His words of love and surety and guidance abiding in us, the Lord alway before us; all the things He has done from the beginning for us, all the words He has from the beginning spoken to us, coming of themselves into our heart-thoughts, the memories of our day-dreams, the sweet thoughts of the watches of the night. Who shall define or generalise these emotions by any single term that will teach us what faith is? If we seek for a single descriptive name for all the diverse states of mind exemplified in the history of faith, we can find none by which we may condense our knowledge in a word like trust, or expectation, or hope. We can only give a historical statement. The intellectual phenomenon of faith which observation would always find, is thinking continually of Him in whom we believe. Varying in the lines of their God-uniting thoughts, the historical “men of faith" had Him movingly, constrainingly ever before their Appreci able dis by human relationships. eyes; they endured as seeing Him. The emotional conscious- 66 13. One human thing alone is fitted to make faith cognistributively able by the human understanding-one human thing, itself not a possible subject of definition-the faith of all manner of human relationships, which is revealed to us as being like religious faith. That faith of human affections is occupied evermore with thinking of the facts of the believed-in love-in these facts beholding evermore the beloved person-intentionally musing on him, or with the unconscious unindividualising kind |