heard of His sympathy, and it arose to beseech Him only the more vehemently. She had probably been, after her first paralysing shock, halting behind, only crying forth her heavyladen prayer. She came up again after them to His presence, and prostrated herself before Him, saying, "Lord, help me." Sore beyond mere reason's power to bear up under was the answer that she was to get when He at last spoke directly to herself, but spoke in words so terribly different in spirit from all she had ever heard of the healer and consoler. "He answered her and said, It is not meet to take the children's bread and to cast it to dogs." What words could like these crush a soul that could only reason with itself? And it was not the answer of reason that she gave, but a true device of the heart, at once going round about all the difficulties of reason with some happy taking hold of a word let fall by the besought and trusted though refusing One. "Truth, Lord," she said, "for it is the crumbs the dogs eat, which fall from the master's table." He tried her no farther. He stopped the revealing discipline of heart which brought her, the first fruits of the Gentile world, to look so closely on Him, and know what faith she could have in Him, and He said to her, "O woman, great is thy faith; be it unto thee even as thou wilt." The belief of the heart which appeared in the sisters of Lazarus was of a different type. It was not a newborn inspiration, rising in an hour when sore need and unlooked-for opportunity met, and making fast quick use of tidings of Jesus' widely exercised power and compassion to encourage the helpless heart to come to Him for help. Theirs was a faith which had settled itself down in their hearts during many months of a strange happiness they had passed through in intercourse with His more than earthly wisdom and attractiveness. It was a faith that did not speak much except within, but it sat much at His feet to listen to Him, or took itself up with ministering to Him in silent service and honouring, and did not express in words their necessities or their strong desires to Him, even in the time of utmost need, feeling that He would know and would do all that love should. When death was approaching their brother, they sought the help of their

friend by this message only, "Lord, behold, he whom thou lovest is sick." No word of complaint or request they sent from Bethany thirty miles beyond Jordan, where He was sojourning, sure that that message would bring Him who loved Lazarus. This faith in His readiness of affection was tried by seeming neglect. "Jesus abode three days in the place where He was," and death, and even the grave, held their brother before his friend arose to go to Bethany. Yet behold how the silent heart of each held fast its faith in Him, and questioned not why He had not come to save, but, even with the forbidding hand of death holding back all reason's power to hope, still spoke to itself of His love and His power. "Lord, if thou hadst been here my brother had not died," was the thought that still filled their hearts. It was all that Martha said, when, hearing that He was come, she went out to meet Him, leaving her younger grief-oppressed sister with their kind neighbours in the house; and when they came to bid Mary go out to Him, she spoke to Him but the same words, "Lord, if thou hadst been here my brother had not died." How true heart-words were those words of undefining petition, unprescribing trust-trust even when He did slay instead of healing! Other words were to follow, how high above all the courage of reasoning, yet a pure reasoning; only one of the heart cleaving to God as a little child's heart, not of the mind building for itself hopes whose growth men would recognise. Lazarus was in the grave four days. Martha herself had realised and spoken of the dissolution then certainly reducing his body to corruption, yet she added the words--indefinite and meaningless to rational thought alone, but how full of meaning as the words of her clinging to Jesus for help, she knew not of what kind, a faith startlingly marvellous when interpreted by the result-" But even now I know that whatsoever thou shalt ask of God, God will give it thee." He answered the unexpressed but understood appeal of the heart's faith-which was one surely called forth by His own Spirit savingly communing with her spirit, and helping her infirmity so to believe in His divine power and grace-with the promise, "Thy brother shall rise again." Her faith was but partly de

finite, partly grasped with conscious firmness; and true to all human nature's experience of infirmity in the emotions of its faith, she began immediately to shrink from laying hold of the definite blessing, and to put it far off to the time of all the bereaved's blessedness. "I know that he shall rise again at the resurrection, at the last day." But her soul, though she knew it not, was ready to receive all; and He that was mighty to save strengthened her with the reproach of love wherewith God and man, God's child, alike strengthen failing faith. "Said I not unto thee, that if thou wouldst believe thou shouldst see the glory of God?" "I am the resurrection and the life: he that believeth in me, though he be dead, shall live; and he that liveth and believeth in me shall never die. Believest thou this? And she said, Yea, Lord, I believe that thou art the Christ, the Son of God, which should come into the world."

Christian

10. The verification of the conclusions come to in Chapters Completed II., V., and VI., by comparison with recorded examples, which faith. has now been hastily gone over in the histories of patriarchal and Hebrew faith, and faith in the visible Saviour, should be practicable in the case of Christian faith, the completed religious faith which contemplates Christ no longer seen. The faith accordingly which we can see in the disciples after He had "gone away," and the faith which they direct in all who believe through their word, is one, the elements of which are those above described—a thinking of facts belonging to the personal history of God manifest in flesh; realising "things' now that they are no longer seen, things of performance or promise or manifestation of character; and thinking on them with a reasoning which is not of the intellect alone, but of the heart. His own direction to man's faith was, "Abide in me, and I in you." Who was the "I" and the "me"? Necessarily that very Jesus whom the writers of the Gospels knew by face and voice and manner of affection and behaviour to them-the Jesus we know "by their words," that personal uniquely individual Redeemer, the Son of God become for our sakes the Son of man-the human-hearted Messiah who grew up from a human infancy in our sight in favour with God and with man. It can be no indefinite Godhead set before our conception by

reasoning on doctrinal attributes, but the Jesus of history, the Jesus of fulfilled prophecy, of minute biography, and of a definitely promised future. "To have Him ever before us," to "endure as seeing Him, now He is invisible," is to have in habitual, most facile, or rather haunting remembrance, a history—a mass of illustrations of personal qualities and relative affections; words of grace and truth; miraculous helps of all temporal needs, typical of awaiting spiritual and eternal salvations-a mass of divine facts become human, which the heart fuses into a beloved portrait, which it can fill up with affecting details on the call of any individual need or desire of faith faster than the unmoved intellect. What is it to have "Christ dwelling in our hearts by faith," "formed in us," "in us, the hope of glory," when the Spirit has glorified Him by taking of His and showing unto us? What Christ can be in us but the historical Jesus of Nazareth, whom alone we have been taught God manifest in flesh, distinctly realised from the words of those who companied with Him; realised, and, though yet unseen by us, ready to be recognised; an individual being surrounded with distinct facts of hope, which are to be inherited jointly with Him, in "union" with Him, in a place prepared for us by Him, in His and our Father's house, a divine and human heaven, clearly described in outline to us in Heb. xii.? What is it in the mean time to "believe on Him, and not let our heart be troubled"?-the direction He gave at the end of His familiarly-known human life (John xiv. 1). He explained immediately that to know Him was to know the invisible Father, and that they should have known Him in the long time He had been with them. To "believe in" Him thus now must be to think of Him in terms of the Gospel narratives of His sayings and deeds; to think with heart-assuring thoughts of His definite help, of no general but particular perfectly instructed sympathy in any class of troubles from without, and in any fears from within, arising from sinless weaknesses the help and sympathy brought recognisably to faith's sight by facts of His sufferings, tribulations, and weaknesses of the same kind. Paul's new life was lived by this historically-instructed faith (Gal. ii. 20), a faith holding fast a per

sonal union with Christ the Son of God, who loved him and gave Himself for him. The historical love of Christ constrained him to live unto Him (2 Cor. v. 15)-Him realised in a particular manner, Him "who died for us and rose again." Peter exhibits to us faith advancing on the path of holiness to heaven in constant sight of the historical Jesus-Jesus of a past and of a future alike definite. "Whom having not seen ye love; in whom, though now ye see Him not, yet believing, ye rejoice with joy unspeakable and full of glory, receiving the end of your faith, the salvation of your souls" (1 Pet. i. 8-9). Through the knowledge of Him who hath called us to glory and virtue . . . are given unto us exceeding great and precious promises, that by these ye might be partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world through lust" (2 Pet. i. 4). John's thoughts were heartrejoicing thoughts of closest relationship, that of "sons" to God, the future gloriousness of which was not yet conceivable by him, but was all embraced in promised closeness of place and nature to the personal Jesus, whose beloved disciple he had been. "We shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is; and every man that hath this hope in him purifieth himself, even as He is pure" (1 John iii. 2-3).

tion of

of believ

11. A verifying illustration by Scriptural language, doctrinal Verificaor practical, of more minute parts of the process of faith, has the process been interspersed in the foregoing chapters. Let the following short consecutive comparison be added.

ing.

attention.

12. The first step of faith in the things of God-viz., arrested Arrested attention leading to remembrance, consideration, and intellectual conviction-was the reason of Jehovah's "getting Himself honour upon Pharaoh,” and of the systematic providence by which He afterwards made "the nations know themselves to be but men," and acknowledge that there is a God that "judgeth on the earth." Israel's shortcoming in this readiness of perception or remembrance was reproached as unbelief throughout their early history; e.g., Deut. i. 32, Ps. lxxviii. 22, 32, and Ps. cvi. 24. In the New Testament it is the explanation of Paul's words (1 Cor. xiv. 22), “Tongues are for a sign, not to them which believe, but to them which