Jesus as Lord, and ourselves as your servants for Jesus' sake." His vision of Christian truth was purged and rectified by his vision of Christ. Never to St. Paul could the merely secular, merely historic circumstances of the Incarnation obscure its profound and all-embracing significance. He who had seen the Divine Christ in His Glory-in whom it had pleased God, by a miracle of sovereign grace, “to reveal His Son "-could never sink his conception of the Master to the level of tradition, or bind his thought in the category of time. "Wherefore," he cries, we henceforth know no man after the flesh : even though we have known Christ after the flesh, yet now we know Him so no more." And, therefore, because the Christ of St. Paul is no conventional or contemporary Teacher, child of his own age, and prophet of his own race, but a Divine Person, in conscious contact with those who know and trust Him, drawing men to Himself with "bands of love," and sweetening the arduous ways of duty by the solaces of comradeship,-because the Christ of the Pauline Epistles is the Agent then and now of the one perpetual miracle of Christianity, which no scepticism can bring into doubt, and no materialism altogether ignore, the miracle of conversion, a living Master, magnanimous as masterful, who still, as then, waylays men on the highways of error and crime, and arrests them with the vision of Himself, and saves them from their sins, because, in truth, the Christ of St. Paul is the Christ whom we also can see, and love, and serve, therefore, across the wastes of nearly two millenniums, the record of the "wonderful conversion" on the road to Damascus rings true to the Christian conscience, and strikes home to the Christian heart, and the words of the great Convert utter the ideal and confess the secret of all valid and prevailing Christian Ministry to the end of time. "We preach not ourselves, but Christ Jesus as Lord, and ourselves as your servants for Jesus' sake. Seeing it is God, that said, Light shall shine out of darkness, who shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ." XII THE FAITH THAT IS BLESSED1 JESUS SAITH UNTO HIM, BECAUSE THOU HAST SEEN ME, thou HAST BELIEVED BLESSED ARE THEY THAT HAVE NOT SEEN, AND YET HAVE BELIEVED.-St. John xx. 29. THE notion of "doubt" in the familiar modern sense of the word-the "honest doubt" in which the representative poet of our time said that there "lives more faith" than in "half the creeds "—is alien to the thought of the Old Testament. We are told that "the Hebrew of the Old Testament seems to lack an exact equivalent to our term 'doubt,' when used in a religious reference."2 Elijah is, indeed, represented as, on a memorable occasion, challenging the verdict of his countrymen on the rival claims to their spiritual allegiance of Baal and Jehovah. "How long halt ye between two opinions? if the Lord be God, follow Him: but if Baal, then follow 1 Preached in Westminster Abbey, December 21, 1902. him." But this appeal implies no genuine distress of mind as to the legitimacy of either claim, but only the inherent absurdity of a divided obedience. The prophets battle with the incredulity of their contemporaries, but that incredulity always has its roots in flagitious conduct, never in genuine mental perturbation. The "men that are settled on their lees, that say in their heart, The Lord will not do good, neither will He do evil," against whom Zephaniah cries the sentence of a swift and certain destruction, were assuredly not troubled with the "obstinate questionings" which now harass the thoughtful and educated man, whether avowedly Christian or not, but were, like thousands of prosperous men who among ourselves accept a conventional creed which has no influence on their conduct, sunken in the practical atheism of selfindulgence. When we pass to the New Testament we find ourselves in another atmosphere. The paramount importance of faith is everywhere asserted. The demand of the Incarnate upon the generation which saw and heard Him, is summed up in the demand for faith. All spiritual graces implied in that heavenly enfranchisement which in Christ the Father bestows on men, are contingent on the presence in them of this quality. That absent, the Incarnation is infertile of blessing, potent only for judgment. This faith, indeed, is not pre-eminently intellectual but moral, though the intellectual element is not absent. All that we mean by sympathy, insight, trust, self-surrender, is included in the faith of discipleship; the implied acceptance of revealed truth always seems rather a natural consequence of a relationship towards the Divine Master than a preliminary condition of that relationship, proposed on the one side, considered and fulfilled on the other. Men believed Christ's doctrine because they believed in Christ; they did not believe in Christ because they believed His doctrine. This indeed is properly involved in the notion of discipleship, for a disciple is not primarily one who knows but one who learns, and his distinctive act of faith is not in such and such doctrines but in the Teacher of his choice. Now, as faith is thus paramount in the New Testament, so we find that doubt (not, indeed, in its modern sense, but certainly in senses which approximate thereto) is prominent. "In the New Testament we meet with a series of terms which run through the shades of meaning expressed by our words, perplexity, suspense, distraction, hesitation, questioning, scepticism, shading down into unbelief.” 1 1 Hastings, Dict. of Bible, i. 618. |