THESE THREE.

But now abideth faith, hope, love, these three; and the greatest of these is love..—1 Cor. xiii. 13.

1. IF St. Paul had left us nothing but this exquisite hymn in praise of heavenly love, he would have established his claim to be a great religious genius. Happily it loses nothing in the English Version. The scholars who translated the Bible for James I.'s government seldom failed to rise to a great occasion; and this chapter in the Authorized Version is one of the finest bits of prose poetry that have been written in our language. But the lyric rapture is St. Paul's own. He was not, perhaps, a poet by nature; and a Rabbinical education was enough to dry up any but a very copious spring of poetic talent. But every now and then he is carried quite out of himself, and his words glow with a white heat of fervour and emotion. To read the thirteenth chapter after the twelfth, in which he discusses the relative merits of speaking with tongues and prophesying, is almost startling. "The more excellent way" once mentioned, the tide of pure inspiration flows swift and strong.

2. But even more remarkable than the sublime poetry of this chapter is the concluding verse: "Now abideth faith, hope, love, these three; but the greatest of these is love." In this verse St. Paul has found an absolutely complete and satisfactory formula for the Christian character. Faith, hope, and love, with love in the place of honour-is not this Christianity in a nutshell? Within a few years after the Ascension, St. Paul has not only penetrated to the very heart of Christ's teaching, but has given us the kernel of the whole Gospel in one of those illuminating phrases which are a necessity for every great movement. So at least the Church has always felt. The three emblematic figures

of the "theological virtues," as they were called, have been favourite themes of Christian art and Christian eloquence all over the world. What the cardinal virtues, Justice, Fortitude, Prudence, and Temperance were to pagan antiquity; what Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity were to the French Revolution; what the Rights of Man were to the founders of the American Republic; what the three stages in the spiritual ascent-Purification, Illumination, Union with God-have been to mystics of all ages and countries, that Faith, Hope, and Love have been and are to the Christian. The imitation of Christ means the life of Faith, the life of Hope, the life of Love.

¶ Greek philosophy had proclaimed four cardinal virtues— justice, prudence, temperance, fortitude. Christian philosophy, following St. Paul, has taught during nineteen centuries that there are three specifically Christian graces-they are more than virtues-three primary and fundamental spiritual dispositions, which must dominate and permeate all true Christian characterFaith and Hope and Love.

This is one of the greatest of the great texts of the Bible. Let us take it in six parts

Faith.
Hope.

Love.

These Three.

These Three Abide.

The Greatest of these Three.

FAITH.

1. St. Paul has written as vigorously of faith, if not with as much seraphic eloquence, as he here writes of love. He penned the most intellectual and profound of all his Epistles-that to the Romans-to indicate the essential excellence, the justifying and soul-saving power of faith. We who have come to receive the truth which filled and fired the soul of the Apostle Paul have learned that by faith the just live. It is a rational and necessary spiritual ingredient of the truest manhood. We regard it as the channel through which God's righteousness pours into the soul; as our gate of access into the kingdom of grace, standing like the

Propylæa at Athens before the Acropolis, and giving entrance to the temple not only of love, but also of wisdom. St. Paul went so far as to say that any moral activity into which this quality did not enter was vitiated and unworthy. In one of his letters he describes faith as the light by which the soul walks: "A light that never was on sea or land," but which glows in the mind of man. To his thinking this virtue was so needful and important that the whole doctrine which he proclaimed he called by this name. He speaks of "preaching the faith" which he once persecuted, meaning by it both the Christian doctrine and the Christian Church. Our warfare he calls "the fight of faith"; so that in his thirteen letters, from the First Epistle to the Thessalonians to the letters addressed to Philemon, St. Paul sounds forth a thousand notes from this golden string.

2. What is the antithesis of faith? Is it Reason? Do I believe some things because I am convinced by evidence that they are true, and other things because the Church tells me to believe them, or because it is a meritorious act to force myself to believe them? Is faith an act of submission to authority? Is there any truth in the answer of the child, who, according to the story, said, "Faith means believing what you know to be untrue"? Look out some of the places where faith is mentioned in the New Testament, and see whether it is ever opposed to Reason. You will find that it never is: it is opposed to sight. Faith is not the acceptance of certain historical propositions on insufficient evidence. It is trust in God and goodness.

It is the resolution to stand or fall by the noblest and highest hypothesis that we can conceive. It is the spirit of Athanasius when he stood "against the world"; of Luther when he said, "God help me, I can do no otherwise "; of Job when he said, "Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him"; of the three children in the furnace when they said, "He will deliver us out of thy hand, O King. But if not, we will not serve thy gods." It is the spirit which has given courage to all the martyrs to face death. Faith is the confidence that somehow or other the right must triumph, that God is stronger than Satan.

I resolved that at any rate I would act as if the Bible were true; that if it were not, at all events I should be no worse off

than I was before; that I would believe in Christ, and take Him for my Master in whatever I did; that assuredly to disbelieve the Bible was quite as difficult as to believe it; that there were mysteries either way; and that the best mystery was that which gave me Christ for a Master. And when I had done this I fell asleep directly. When I rose in the morning the cold and cough were gone; and though I was still unwell, I felt a peace and spirit in me I had never known before, at least to the same extent; and the next day I was quite well, and everything has seemed to go right with me ever since, all discouragement and difficulties vanishing even in the smallest things.1

(1) Faith is trust in the saving power of Christ.-" Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved" would seem to be the simplest of all directions. Many, in Apostolic times, hesitated to believe, but none hesitated as to what belief was. A heathen or pagan never asks a missionary what is meant by faith. The very simplicity of the act prevents its definition. Like time and space, the more we think about faith, the less we understand it. It must be felt, not analysed. It cannot be analysed. Many a Christian life has been mournfully chequered by dark and cheerless seasons, from the habit of thinking about faith instead of the object of faith, about the acts of the mind instead of the truths of God, the manner of believing instead of the testimony to be believed. Faith leads the soul to act on what it credits. It includes not only the belief of what is true, and the desire of what is good, but the choice of what is right. We may believe many things which have no possible connection with our conduct. Many of the propositions of Scripture are not the proper objects of trust, though they are of belief. We believe on the ground of evidence, we trust on the ground of character. We believe a truth, we trust a person. I might believe and not trust, but I cannot trust and not believe. So the specific act of faith which unites to Christ terminates upon His person, an existing, living, loving personality. It is not a doctrine concerning Christ that saves me, but trust in the saving power of Christ. It is not a specific theory of faith, but the practical grasp of faith, that saves. Salvation is not the formation of a right creed in my understanding; it is the quickening of a spiritual life in my soul.

1 Letter from Ruskin to his father in E. T. Cook's Life of Ruskin, i. 271.

¶ Faith is that strong buoyant confidence in God and in His love which gives energy and spirit to do right without doubt or despondency. Where God sees that, He sees the spring and fountain out of which all good springs: He sees, in short, the very life of Christ begun, and He reckons that to be righteousness; just as a small perennial fountain in Gloucestershire is the Thames, though it is as yet scarcely large enough to float a schoolboy's boat; and just as you call a small seedling not bigger than a little almond peeping above the ground, an oak; for the word "justify" means not to be made righteous, but to reckon or account righteous.1

I am not sure that we are much the better for our attempted definitions of Faith. Baxter connects it with the doctrine of the mystical union; Lampe defines it as a willingness to be saved by Christ; Halyburton and Owen as a cordial acceptance of the offer; Sandeman as simple belief in simple testimony. Well, a man is sometimes very little the better for a definition, and all these perplex as well as enlighten. But "none perish that Him trust "-none perish that Him trust.2

(2) Faith is also trust in God as a Father.-If there is a word more expressive of Christian character than any other, it is this one: trust-trust in God. It is the secret source of all peace and serenity. It will comfort and sustain when nothing else can. It gives the child of God the delightful assurance that all his trials are disguised blessings, the appointment of a Father's wisdom, and the infliction of a Father's love. And death itself becomes the security and enlargement of life, a training for that holy intimacy with Himself which is to constitute the blessedness of the heavenly world. "Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him." The bringing of good out of evil is His grand prerogative. He permits the evil in order to produce the good. The Christian's character is formed more from his trials than from his enjoyments. The picture would have no beauty or effect without shade.

Christ's faith in His Father was as conspicuous as His faith in the mission He had to accomplish, of which He said on the cross, "It is finished!" His vindication He left entirely in His Father's hands, when He yielded up His spirit, in a complete surrender of self, saying, "Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit!" I am not forgetting that He was the everlasting 1 F. W. Robertson, in Life and Letters, 335.

"Rabbi" Duncan, in Memoir of John Duncan, 414,