the manner of all the affections of the divine life; which are essentially affections not bestowed or received as between beings distinctly separated and independent, but interchanged, and needed to be so on both sides, as the enjoyment and support of a natural union which cannot be broken or intermitted but with suffering. A union that must be conscious pervades Col. i. and ii. It is spoken of expressively in Paul's experience (Gal. ii. 20): “I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life that I now live in the flesh I live" (not in the flesh anxiously given up to, having my conversation in, the things of the flesh, but) “in the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave Himself for me" (consciously enjoying, given up to, the pleasure and security of His love and saving help). Compare 1 Pet. i. 8, 2 Cor. v. 5-8, Phil. i. 6, Ps. lxiii., Jude 19-25. Less definitely reasoning, but strongly sympathetic, consciousness of the need and sufficiency of union to Jesus was the faith of two widely different cases among His personal followers (Mat. ix. 21, Luke vii. 38). James (i. 6) seems to make the union of conscious dependence essential to the prayer of faith. Paul (2 Cor. x. 5) sets it forth as the true condition of a hearer. In Heb. iv. 2 he makes conscious union with the body of believers-being of one heart and sympathy with them-essential to profiting by the word of faith.-Compare Eph. iv. 11-13. The reader of the Psalms will recognise this consciousness of connective sympathy, appropriate dependence, reciprocal possession, relational oneness, spiritual assimilation, richly characterising their subjective language.

The fact which is contained in this consciousness, that religious faith contemplates one object continually—a person whom it thinks of directly in connection with all the facts of religious fear and love and salvation—a person who has been in this manner the object of all religious faith from the beginning of revelation-will be considered in the next chapter.

CHAPTER VIII.

The same

person the

Object of the faiths

of all times.

THE OBJECT OF FAITH.

JOHN viii. 58.-Before Abraham was, I am.

LUKE xxiv. 27.-Beginning at Moses and the prophets, He expounded unto them the things concerning Himself.

ACTS i. 11.-This same Jesus shall so come in like manner as ye have seen Him go into heaven.

HEB. xiii. 8.-Jesus Christ the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever.

1. THE subject of faith is, "God so loved the world." The fact given to be thought of as proving and showing forth that great love is, that "He gave His only-begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life" (John iii. 16). That fact, looked forward to, beheld, and looked back upon, has been the matter of faith's thoughts from the beginning of God's love being revealed; and so it comes to pass, that to all positions from which mankind have looked unto God's love, the object that has been always before them has been, is, and will be, He whom we now think of as Jesus. When the patriarchs thought of the great promises, they "saw His day and were glad" (John viii. 56), and "esteemed the reproach of Christ greater riches than all the treasures of Egypt" (Heb. xi. 26). When the men of "the fulness of times" looked upon the work of redeeming love, they beheld "Him that was to come"-Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God unto salvation, and who was "to come again," "this same Jesus," to "receive them unto Himself." When Christians look back or forward upon the ways of God with man, thinking upon the work of mercy and salvation from the promise of the seed of the woman to the preparing of the house of many mansions,

it is the same being of love who went about doing good among the generation of the fulness of times that they see from the beginning to the endless end, showing and promising redeeming love to Adam's race. The "same yesterday, to-day, and for ever" (Heb. xiii. 8), it was He, "the only-begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father," that "declared" the Father to every period of fallen man's hearing the glad tidings as well as to the Jews of Pilate's time.

Love of

2. Not the mere declarer or perfected manifestation of the Christ the love of God to man His coming from Adam's days to that God. last "day of the Lord," when He shall come without sin unto salvation, is itself the love of God. The fact of Christ is the fact of which all other facts of God's so loving the world are parts, expositions, or consequences; and so religious faith, the faith of salvation contemplating these, becomes, like all faith known in the authoritative analogy of family life, faith in a person-faith in the Son of God, the Saviour of the world.

conspectus

3. The opening description of the Object of Christian faith Historical in the Epistle to the Hebrews, "His Son, whom He hath ap- in Heb. i. pointed heir of all things, by whom also He made the worlds" (Heb. i. 2), prepares and suggests the thought of this connection of Jesus of Nazareth, the personal Christ, with the whole history of mankind's earth; leading us to think of that history as embraced by, embosomed in, this great being, the "Son," the visible part of whose earthly connection with it was His coming to "purge our sins" (ver. 3). The writer in that passage gives us to recognise as the central historical thought of his faith, that the person known as Jesus of Nazareth, the "Son in whom God spake" to mankind in the last days who had spoken by prophets in earlier times, is the same being who was the manifestation of God at the creation of visible things and will be at the consummation of that temporary condition, and is the upholder of that condition while it endures. The "heir of all things," by whom God "created the worlds," "who upholdeth all things by the word of His power," is He "in whom God spake to man," "who being the brightness of His glory, and the express image of His person, when He had purged our sins, sat down on the right hand of the

Human

history

in the history of

Majesty on high" (Heb. i. 3). It is of immeasurable comfort to faith to be able to gather up all its thoughts of God's will and ways with mankind into this one assuring sight, Christ Jesus; and behold the history of God's love made one in Him -the same love yesterday, to-day, and for ever—the things of it that took place in heaven and the things on earth and the things in the new heaven and the new earth, all one love assured and administered by one unchanging Saviour. The title of Pantocreator given to Christ in the worship of the Byzantine Church is a happier recognition of this truth than modern creeds contain. 4. When we carry with us the fact that wherever, in the embraced full revelation of truth which New Testament Scripture contains, the love of the heavenly Father to the race He made in "the Son." His own image is offered, expounded, or enforced, it is in terms of "His Son," we see a peculiar importance in the history of human kind being thus all embosomed in a personal history of "God's well-beloved Son" as itself part of that history. It is a historical contemplation, given to our faith, of the fact declared in words in 1 John iii. 2, which gives a force of assurance beyond the force of words to that commissioned declaration: "Beloved, now are we the sons of God; and it doth not yet appear what we shall be: but we know that, when He shall appear, we shall be like Him; for we shall see Him as He is." Man's present life is a part of the life of the Eternal Son, the well-beloved Son of God. My Father, and your Father;" "because I live, ye shall live also" (John xx. 17, xiv. 19), are words natural to it, belonging to our true condition, our condition now, and from the beginning, and for evermore. Our Saviour, the image of His glory, in whose image we were made, inseparably associated in our thoughts with the creation of our world, and of ourselves a part of that world, we are to associate in inseparable personality with all the history of providence. And we are to think of the human future by one essential character, that of its being His anticipated possession-thinking of Him as the heir of all things, most prominently of all human things-His everlasting life identified with our kind new-created in His image-we, the many brethren, sons of God, of whom He is the first-born-He the heir of all things, of which we are to

be joint-heirs with Him in God's newly blessed life—and that life "the restitution of all things" from an imposed "vanity" (Rom. viii. 20), a bondage of corruption under which creation groans and travails in pain until deliverance come to it when the adoption comes to the sons of God. The keeper of spiritual Israel, all human faithful life, stands at the beginning of time -the human world's portion of duration-"the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world;" at the end of time, the consummation of all things, He stands the same "Lamb which had been slain," the Object of heaven's adoration of redeeming love.

identity.

5. Did faith need only, or did it chiefly profit by, theological Proof of proof, that it is the Saviour of the Gospels that we read of in all previous times of revelation, under the diverse names of "the Angel of the Lord," "Jehovah," "the Angel of the covenant," and who was adored with such riches of affectional attributes by the patriarchs and the faithful of Israel, a sufficient proof is, the statement that "no man hath seen God at any time; the only-begotten Son, who is" (ò v, always is) “in the bosom of the Father, He hath declared Him" (John i. 18); and when "the mystery of godliness"-the formerly hidden object and source of all religious life-was a mystery no more, but had been "manifest in the flesh, justified in the Spirit, seen of angels, preached unto the Gentiles, believed on in the world, and received up into glory" (1 Tim. iii. 16), He claimed the same names and showed the same attributes by which the near object of the patriarchs' and Israel's faith had made Himself known-viz., “I AM” (John viii. 58, Rev. i. 17). The appropriate comfort of faith, however, in the identity thus declared, is to be able to recognise the Saviour of the fulness of times from the beginning, along all the line of historical manifestations of God to holy men of old. The means of such an identification, by declaratory names, moral peculiarities, and phrases and incidents explained only by the appearing of Jesus, it is now proposed to point out generally. They seem ample enough for critical evidence, exceeding by much the amount of proof which is held as conclusive in other historical researches.