BY REV. NOAH PORTER, D.D.

FARMINGTON, CONNECTICUT.

STABILITY IN THE CHRISTIAN FAITH.

"Be not carried about with diverse and strange doctrines."-Heb. xiii. 9. THE Gospel was early corrupted with doctrines uncongenial to its nature. While the Apostles were yet living, false teachers insinuated themselves into the churches planted by their care. Judaizing teachers persuaded the disciples that they must be circumcised and obey the law of Moses, or their faith would not save them. It was with particular reference to their teachings, as the subsequent part of the chapter shows, that the Apostle addressed to his brethren of the Hebrews, the exhortation which I have now read. This particular form of doctrine has passed away; but others have taken its place; so that always and everywhere, the exhortation is pertinent; and more especially in this age of free inquiry, and consequent diversity of religious doctrine.

The duty inculcated is that of stability in the Christian faith: -which it will be my object now to enforce.

"Be not carried about with diverse and strange doctrines." The allusion is to ships at sea. Like these driven by contrary winds are unestablished minds under the influence of "diverse and strange doctrines." They say you must be circumcised or you cannot be saved.

They tell you that you must observe the fasts and feasts of the Jewish ritual or you are heretics and schismatics; without the pale of the church and the blessings of the covenant. Do not hearken to them. You see the effect on those who do. They are tossed to and fro as vessels in a storm. They are driven out of their course and threatened with destruction. They are in doubt as to the truth of what they had believed; they profess now one thing and now another; and some at last "make shipwreck of the faith and a good conscience."

The doctrines referred to are described as being "diverse and strange,"-diverse, as they are inconsistent with each otherand strange, as they are inconsistent with the Gospel-unknown VOL. XIX.-No. iv.

4

or not received by the church of Christ and its accredited teachers-strange doctrines, as persons coming from a foreign land are strange persons. This is the explanation suggested by the preceding verses. "Remember them that have the rule over you, who have spoken to you the word of God, whose faith follow, considering the end of their conversation," that is, the termination of their manner of life-their departure out of this world into the future. The reference probably is to Stephen, James, and perhaps,other holy and inspired men who had been their Christian teachers, and whose martyrdom must have left a deep impression on them. The Apostle would have them adhere to the faith which those men embraced, and which sustained them so honorably in their course of life and carried them so triumphantly above the dread of a cruel and ignominious death, "Jesus Christ," he adds, "the same yesterday, to day and for ever." always able, always willing to sustain those who repose themselves on him; intimating that their faith should in like manner be the same, firmly resting on Him as their eternal rock. Be not carried about with doctrines inconsistent alike with the faith of your spiritual guides and the simplicity of your trust in the Redeemer.

The same explanation is suggested by the words immediately following-" It is a good thing that the heart be established with grace, not with meats, which have not profited them that have been occupied therein." The Gospel is a scheme of grace. By this it is distinguished from every false scheme. Whatever doctrines deny, conceal, or frustrate the grace of God in the salvation of his people-his grace in their effectual calling by the working of his power-his grace in their justification through the redemption of Christ-his grace in their preservation by his indwelling Spirit unto eternal life; his grace in their election, before the foundation of the world, as the source of all the blessings of their salvation; are diverse and strange. It is therefore " good," approved of God, and for the peace and salvation of the soul," that the heart be established" in a firm reliance on the grace of God, as here revealed, and not a distinction of meats as clean or unclean, according to an abrogated ritual.

I. That we be not carried about with diverse and strange doctrines, then, it is requisite, in the first place, that we take the word of God for the standard of our faith. It is our blessed privilege, my brethren, as it was of the Hebrews to whom Paul wrote, that to us, the Apostles of the Lord, whom he sent into all the world in his name to preach the Gospel to every creature, with the promise of the Holy Spirit to guide them into all truth, have spoken the word of God; whose faith therefore we are to follow. In the writings of the New Testament, which they, by the good providence of God have given to us, and in the

corresponding writings of the Old Testament, to which, as divinely inspired, they have annexed their Apostolic sanction, they being dead yet speak; and what they speak we are bound to receive with no doubt or hesitation as the word of God. This therefore is to be regarded and reverenced by us, as the rule of faith-the test of truth-the standard, according to which the doctrines which come to us, are to be proved to be doctrines "according to godliness," or "diverse and strange."

"This is the judge that ends the strife,

Where wit and reason fail."

On this single point hangs the question between the true witnesses of God and all the world beside. Deists say, " every man's own reason and. conscience are to him the rule of faith. These alone must decide what he is to believe." So they have as many rules of faith and as diverse and strange doctrines as there are diverse and opposite decisions of man's frail, erring, biassed reason. The Jews say, "Talmud or oral law, and the Mishna, or second law, together with the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments, are the rule of faith, all of equal authority;" and so, while the Scriptures, for these two centuries have been read in their synagogues every sabbath day, they by general consent, as their fathers did before them, have rejected him in whom those Scriptures are so manifestly fulfilled. Catholics say, "the writings of the fathers, and the decrees of the popes and councils, have equal authority with the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments. The holy Scriptures do not contain all that is necessary to salvation and are not sufficient, as the rule of faith. They are obscure and it is not for the common people to read them. Tradition, whether it regards matters of faith or practice is to be received as the true interpretation of the Scriptures." So, by millions they have departed from the faith, to pray to the virgin Mary, to worship images and crosses, to make confession to priests, to purchase absolution with penance or with money, to refuse meats which God has sanctified, and forbid marriage, to depend on the outward washing in baptism as conveying the inward grace, and the material bread in the Lord's Supper as giving eternal life. Thousands of Protestants. so called, there are also, who while they profess to reverence the Bible, as containing the word of God, yet do not receive it, as being itself his word. "God," they say, "revealed to the prophets and apostles the great truths of religion, and left them to communicate these to mankind in their own way, with no security against the false colorings which their misconceptions put upon them." So they take it upon themselves to sit in judgment on the record: and having made all due corrections they tell us, that, according to it, there is no divinity in Christ, no personality in the Holy Ghost, no expiation for sin in the death of Jesus, no native corruption in man, no regeneration by the Spirit, no resurrection of the body, no devil, no hell, no

eternal punishment. And while these exalt their own reason as the standard by which God's word itself is to be tried, others there are of various names who exalt their own impressions, their imagined revelations, or what they call the inward witness of the Spirit, above the word of the Spirit. They care nothing for the letter of the Scriptures, the plain sense of the Bible, a reasonable exposition of its teachings, or a solemn observance of divine ordinances. They are above these carnal things. They have no need of doctrines and ordinances-no, not of the testimony of God himself as to what is truth. How then, men and brethren, shall we not be carried away with diverse and strange doctrines? "To the law and the testimony, if they speak not according to this word, it is because there is no light in them." The great principle of the reformation, the Bible is the sufficient and only rule of faith, must decide us. There is no other safeguard. There is no other standard. It is indeed true, that if you would receive your faith at the dictation of a self-created priesthood, with no thought or inquiry of your own, and if all men would do the same, then might there be one faith all over the world; but unless you are prepared to surrender the first privilege of a rational being, that of deciding for yourselves what pertains to your own highest duty and interest, you have no security against the deceivableness of unrighteousness by which a sinful world is tossed, but by taking the word of God, settled as it is forever in heaven, for your guide. And has God in very deed, in pity of our state, condescended to speak to us from heaven? Are the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments his word? Not only fraught, as the writings of good men generally are with divine truth, but themselves divine-given by inspiration of God? Then do they stand out alone among all the writings in this world. Then are they alone to be received by us as the rule of faith. "We are of God," they say who wrote. them: "he that is of God heareth us; he that is not of God heareth not us; hereby know we the spirit of truth and the spirit of error." This, then, is the first requisite to stability in the christian faith, that we take the word of God as our rule.

II. That by searching the word of God we make ourselves acquainted with the true scheme of faith. That his word may avail us, it must be known; and it were an impeachment on his wisdom-a reflection on his words to suppose him to have so given it, that we are incapable of understanding it, or must necessarily be in doubt as to the truth of our interpretation of it; or to consider the fathers, who succeeded the apostles or divines of later days, better expounders of his mind and will than were the apostles themselves whom he selected, inspired and sealed for that very purpose. Reverence no doubt is due to the opinions of the fathers, and to the teachings of our spiritual guides now

Christian ministers, the parents, the teachers whom God has ordained to instruct us in his word; but that our faith and hope may be in God, we must see for ourselves that what they teach is in truth the word of God. Helpers of our faith, we need as of every other concern temporal and spiritual; but then are mortal men our best helpers, when most they hide themselves behind the effulgency of those divine glories which they make to shine out before us. It was the part of a noble mind in the Jews of Berea, to listen to the accredited teachers of the Gospel, with all readiness of mind, and, having done this, to search the Scriptures to see if these things were so. Had they not done both these, they had not believed. So must we do, would we not be carried about with every wind of doctrine; would we have settled opinions in religion, and opinions which we shall know are justified by the truth of God, and will stand confirmed in the light of eternity..

I have said we must become acquainted with the true scheme of faith. There is a scheme of faith-a system of doctrine-a body of truth-whose parts are mutually dependent and inseparably connected, and by the knowledge of which, therefore, the truth of the whole and of every part, commends itself with convincing power to the mind. It is, as I said before, essentially a scheme of grace. It supposes mankind, with no distinction, to be naturally fallen and perishing-deserving of eternal death and exposed to it ---under the power of sin, and beyond all reasonable hope of selfrecovery-dependent therefore on the grace of God, from the first to the last, for the blessings of salvation. That grace, as flowing forth to believers through the atonement of Christ, and by the quickening and sanctifying power of the Holy Spirit-the grace of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, in the great work of redemption, it is the peculiar glory of the Gospel to reveal. These doctrines are so wrought into every part of the scriptures, are so dependent on each other, and so united in one harmonious scheme, and withal they so commend themselves to every man's conscience that it is not easy for any one who has once seen them as they stand in the book of God, ever afterwards to disbelieve them, or hearken for a moment to doctrines, diverse and plausible as they may be,which are foreign to them. There are individuals, I know, who have fallen away from a good confession into one error after another, and some of them have landed in downright infidelity; but how many of them, when they witnessed that confession, blindly assented to forms of doctrine which they had been taught, without ever truly understanding and believing the doctrines themselves, which those forms were intended to express, another day will show. Some have said that they always stumbled at those doctrines that they never understood or heartily believed them, and that their open renunciation of them was only a declaration of the secret misgivings which they had long before entertained