admire in another, and to declare that we believe in Christ and accept Him as the ideal of our faith and endeavour is already to have something of the Christlife in our soul. The implanted seed contains within it the potency of the completed life.1 There is an element of Pauline truth in Lowell's poem: The thing we long for, that we are Helps make the soul immortal. (3) But justification is not all that faith obtains for the Christian. It is moral energy as well as spiritual vision. It contains the power of new obedience. In faith, as Paul understands it, lie the roots both of a deeper knowledge of God and of a new ethical activity. Even in the common affairs of life faith is an energetic principle. No matter what be its object it always impels to action. It is the spring of all endeavour, the inspiration of all heroism. Every enterprise is carried out by faith, and by faith every noble aim is achieved. In the Christian life it is not otherwise. In the making of character and in the realizing of the kingdom of God, in all personal and social effort, faith is the power in whose might we expect great things and attempt great things. Christian faith works by love. Love is at once its object and its instrument. For it is faith which first assures us of God's gracious character and of our adoption as His children. And it is faith which enables us in the 1 As Browning says: ""Tis not what man does but what man would do, which exalts him." strength of that divine love to live and work for Christ. The Christian not only stands fast in the faith, but by faith also grows and gradually attains to the stature of the perfect man.1 Faith, then, has a threefold function. It is a vision of the ideal in Christ, it is participation in the "good" of Christ, and it is obedience to the law of Christ. As the principle of moral appropriation it has its root in personal trust and its fruit in Christian service. It opens the understanding to truth; it quickens the spiritual imagination; it contributes moral earnestness to character. It brings the whole life into the domain of spiritual freedom, and is the animating and energizing principle of all moral purpose. Faith, in short, may be considered as the characteristic attitude and action of the whole Christian personality in its relation to the spiritual good offered to it in Christ. We may sum up the character of faith as thus described in three particulars. 1. It is a free active principle of appropriation of the offered good. There is indeed a certain element of passivity in it, for there is always implied in faith a quiet acquiescence in the divine will which is described as a waiting on God. But such calmness of spirit is not to be confounded with apathy or the unconscious assimilation of grace. Even in submissive trust there is a free disposal of oneself. By an act of will we assume the receptive attitude and wait upon God. The Spirit of Christ does not enter a man against his will. The door must be opened from within. The heart must be turned to the light. The hand must be put forth to receive the proffered gift. 2. It is the free and active determination of the whole 1Cp. W. R. Inge, Faith and its Psychology, p. 15. man. All the faculties of man must unite in one receptive act. Faith is not the property of any single power. It is not with the mind only that we receive Christ. Nor is it with the heart, the feelings, or the will alone that we respond to His Spirit and obey His commands. In belief the entire manhood becomes receptive. Faith is the resultant of all the forces and experiences of the soul. It is the animating principle of every activity. Life answers to life. It is with his whole strength and heart and mind that man must believe. 3. It follows that the appropriating power of faith is not at once perfect or complete. It is a growing power. Christ may be really, though not yet fully formed, within us. We receive according to the measure of our faith. The moral life is in Paul's view a progressive life. Growth is the proof of its original vitality. Man is not a thing to be acted upon, but a free spirit to be transformed from within, and it is in accordance with this that the work of faith is not a complete and ready-made product, but the slow and gradual assimilation of grace. There is a going from faith to faith1 and from strength to strength. Salvation is potentially given at the beginning, but it has to be worked out through the various experiences of life into all the departments of character and conduct, and faith is the continuous endeavour of the soul to realize the possibilities of its ideal. It only remains to add that the act of faith is not conceived by Paul as a meritorious performance or good work which God rewards with salvation. Paul's whole contention as against the Judaistic legalists is that it is the renunciation of self-righteous claim, a confession of unworthiness, an act of homage to God's grace. It is 1 Rom. i. 17. characterized by lowly modesty and an entire absence of self-glory or sense of achievement. Like the bestowal of the Holy Spirit it, too, is the free gift of God, and the believer is what he is, and is able to do what he does because the Father of lights has bestowed upon him the illumination of His Holy Spirit. Faith links us to Christ by vital and indissoluble bonds. In this fact lie its power and its value. Through it we are connected with the Source and Giver of Life. By it we are made sharers of the divine Being. And all that the Christ-life enfolds and is to be, though as yet unseen by us, is ours. As the writer to the Hebrews says, "faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen" or as another apostle says, even now are we the Sons of God, but it doth not yet appear what we shall be." There thus grows up a mystic union with Christ, an identification of the believer and his Redeemer, so that Christ's acts become his acts. There is a beautiful reciprocity and interchange of giving and receiving, love answering to love, and life to life. In this self-forgetful surrender of the whole man to Christ, the old ego with its inner strife and trembling vanishes and a new self-less personality, a new spiritual manhood takes its place, of which we can give no other explanation than that which Paul offers us, as the secret of his own experience"No more do I live, but Christ liveth in me." "Faith in Christ" means "life in Christ." And this complete yielding of self and vital union with the Saviour, this dying and rising again is at once man's supreme ideal and the source of all moral greatness. CHAPTER VI THE MOTIVES OF THE NEW LIFE CLOSELY akin to the question of end and of power is the question of motive. The consideration of the motives or sanctions of morality has always been a primal one in ethics, and it usually occupies an important place in treatises on the subject. There must be a motive for all human conduct otherwise it would have no moral content or worth. Action without sanctions would be wholly mechanical and necessitarian, and man would simply be a link in the chain of material causes, and his deeds, good and bad alike, would be but the necessary effects of physical antecedents. Nietzsche, who is a virulent assailer of Paul's teaching, as indeed he is of all Christian ideas, has justly remarked that we must always see the "for" or "wherefore" in an ethical system to understand its character and estimate its moral worth. If we understand by a motive that which moves the will, and by sanctions of morality, the reasons or persuasions to moral conduct as well as the deterrents from disobedience, we shall enquire in this chapter what were the grounds upon which Paul based the new life, and what were the incentives or motives to which he appealed in urging his readers and hearers to make it their own. |