There is not a great deal about Faith in his writings: what there is, is chiefly with reference to the standard case of Abraham's Faith. Abraham,' he says, saw into the unfixedness and unsettledness of material being, when he recognised the unfaltering stability which attends true being, and to which he is said to have completely trusted.' 'He anchored himself firmly and unchangeably on true being alone.' 'The only thing stable is Faith toward God, or toward true being.' 1 Philo's 'Faith' is thus a steady reliance on the eternal and unchangeable ideas of truth and righteousness, which lie behind the fleeting shows of phenomenal existence. The active sense has fairly established itself, but Faith for Philo differs rather widely from the Christian virtue in that it is the prize2 and not the starting-point of the race, standing at the end, not at the beginning, of the religious life.

Sanday and Headlam 3 have a valuable note on the use of the word Faith in the apocryphal literature. In the Psalms of Solomon it is attributed to the Messiah Himself; in the other books it is characteristic of his subjects. Thus 4 Esdras vi. 28, 'florebit fides et vincetur corruptela '; vii. 34, ' veritas stabit et fides convalescet.' In the Apocalypse of Baruch we have, 'incredulis tormentum ignis reservatum.' In other places we have 'Faith and works' in combination, indicating that the discussion of their relative merits did not originate in the Christian Church.

We now come to the New Testament. I think that for our purposes it will be most convenient to take the Synoptic Gospels first, as a record of our Lord's actual teaching about, and attitude towards, Faith; the Pauline conception of Faith next; the Epistle to the Hebrews third;

1 Cf. E. A. Abbott, Johannine Vocabulary.

2 Philo, De Praem, et Poen., ii. p. 412, διδακτικῇ χρησάμενος ἀρετῇ πρὸς τελείωσιν ἄθλου αἱρεῖται τὴν πρὸς τὸν Θεὸν πίστιν.

3 On Romans i. 17.

and the Johannine interpretation of our Lord's teaching last. This order is not intended to imply any disparagement of the Fourth Gospel as a historical document; but St. John certainly wrote for his own generation, and it is possible to speak of a Johannine doctrine of Faith, which must not be taken out of its chronological place.

The Triple Tradition does not agree in any saying of Christ containing the verb TσTevel; and in the use of the substantive Tίoris the only verbatim agreement is 'thy faith hath saved thee,' of the woman with the issue of blood. Nevertheless, there can be no doubt that our Lord spoke of 'Faith' and ' believing' in the technical religious sense which is characteristic of the New Testament as a whole. There seems to be no objection on linguistic grounds. Not only did the Hebrew word acquire an active meaning in Rabbinical literature, but in the Aramaic dialect (according to Lightfoot on Galatians, p. 154), an active form had been developed. How far this language was original with Him, it is difficult to say. It is extremely probable that the words were often on the lips of the simple folk in Palestine who' waited for the kingdom of God.' We have seen that all was ready for the richer doctrine of Faith which was part of Christ's message. The devout country people among whom He was brought up had not much to learn about confidence in God, about conviction of the reality of the unseen, or about patient waiting for the consolation of Israel.

In the Synoptic Gospels, Faith generally means confidence in Christ's power to perform some particular thing. It would be superfluous to enumerate the cases in which Faith is mentioned as the condition of miracles of healing. In these instances, Faith is simply the psychological state which alone makes the patient susceptible to cures of this kind. There are, however, many passages, especially if we add the uses of the verb TσTEVE to those of the substantive, in which the wider sense of trustful self-surrender

to Christ, or to God, is clearly indicated. There is only one place in the Synoptics, I think (Matt. xxiii. 23), in which Tíoris means "integrity'; and so strong have its theological associations already become, that it is never used of man's faith in man. When it has an object, that object is in the genitive, as St. Mark xi. 22, ‘have faith in God'; not with a preposition (év, eis, πpós, éñí) as in the Epistles. But in the large majority of cases, it is used absolutely. When 'Faith' is primarily expectation of a miracle, a deeper thought is sometimes present. In the case of the paralytic, remission of sins precedes the physical cure (Matt. ix. 1-8); and in Luke vii. 50 the characteristic words, thy Faith hath saved thee,' are used of forgiveness only, when there has been no miracle. Our Lord must have spoken much of the moral force of Faith, of what is now sometimes called the dynamic of religion. In the figurative and even hyperbolical language which He often used in popular teaching, He said that Faith, though no larger than a grain of mustard-seed, can remove mountains (Matt. xvii. 20), a phrase which became familiar to Christians (1 Cor. xiii. 2) at a very early date. Cf. also Mark ix. 23 If thou canst believe, all things are possible to him that believeth.' That this Faith ought to be but is not always an abiding state is shown by the words to Peter (Luke xxii. 32), ‘I have prayed for thee, that thy Faith fail not.' There are some who 'for a while believe, but in time of temptation fall away' (Matt. xiii. 20). In Matt. xvi. 17, 'These signs shall follow them that believe,' we have an approximation to the use of the participle as a designation of the Christian society, 'the believers,' which we find in the Acts.1

One passage in the Synoptists seems to me to stand quite alone-Luke xviii. 8. When the Son of Man cometh, shall

1 It is worth while also to call attention to Matt. xxiii. 23. 'justice, mercy and faith.' Cf. Micah vi. 8 of which these words may be a reminiscence. The third virtue, Faith, is added by Christ.

He find Faith' (or, the Faith)' on the earth? I am unable to understand these words except in the sense that though God will avenge his saints 'speedily' (see the preceding verse), yet the time will appear so long before the second coming that the love of many will have waxed cold. 'Faith,' or 'the Faith,' will hardly be found on the earth. 1 must confess that the words sound more like an expression of the discouragement which we know to have been felt by the second and third generations of Christians, when hope deferred' of the rapovoía was 'making the heart sick,' than what we should have expected to have from the lips of our Lord. If the words are authentic, we must take Faith' (with the best orthodox commentators) in the less natural sense of the necessary Faith,' or 'the Faith that perseveres in prayer.'

To sum up: Faith,' and 'to believe,' in the Synoptic Gospels, means a spirit of simple receptiveness towards the Messiah and His message, a state of mind which, unlike the righteousness of the Pharisees, requires no previous course of discipline in meritorious actions. 'Faith' is the primary motion of the human spirit when brought into contact with Divine truth and goodness. Its fruits are loyal self-devotion, even unto death, complete renunciation of all earthly ties, in so far as these could come between the disciple and his Master, untiring energy in service, and an enthusiastic temper, full of love, joy, and peace. This is really the whole content of Faith, as preached by Jesus to the simple folk whom He gathered round Him in Galilee.

We next turn to St. Paul's Epistles. I do not wish to discuss the more technical theological problems connected with the Pauline doctrine of Faith, but only to determine what the word means for him. One of the most significant passages is Gal. iii. 23, πρὸ τοῦ ἐλθεῖν τὴν πίστιν, before the coming of [the] Faith.' This expression proves that the Christians felt their 'Faith' to be something new in the world; as new as their 'Love,' for which they required

1

an almost new word in the Greek language, their 'Hope,' which the pagans conspicuously lacked (Eph. ii. 12), and their 'Joy,' which no man could take from them. The coming of Christ was the coming of [the] Faith. The Acts of the Apostles shows that the disciples soon began to call themselves 'Believers'; it was one of the earliest names of the Christian society. Whether, as Lightfoot suggests,2 the name indicates The Trusty' as well as 'The Trustful,' is uncertain; the active meaning certainly predominates. The name was familiar to friends and foes in the time of Minucius Felix, who shows that it had been Latinisedpistorum præcipuus et postremus philosophus '3—since 'credulus' was impossible. The pagans in the time of Celsus employed it as an opprobrious term for their opponents. In other places St. Paul uses the Faith' almost as equivalent to the whole body of Christian doctrine and practice (Gal. i. 23 ; vi. 10, τοὺς οἰκείους τῆς πίστεως= the Church; Rom. xii. 3, 6; Eph. iv. 13.)

The coming of Christ was the beginning of the dispensation of Faith, and the new virtue had found a name both in Greek and Aramaic. For the Jews, a bridge was found in the text about 'faithful Abraham,' which, as we have seen, was made to support a heavy superstructure of doctrine even by Philo, and was discussed with equal eagerness in the Rabbinical schools.1 The meaning of Faith was being defined by controversy, and the concept was as yet so fluid that St. Paul and St. James can flatly contradict each other in words without differing much in meaning.

St. Paul's theology, we are now beginning to see, must be interpreted by what we know of his personal religious experiences, which he naturally expounds by the help of current theological ideas and conceptions. Put very 1 Harnack, Expansion of Christianity, ii. 6.

2 Lightfoot, Galatians, p. 157.

3 There is a play on words here, between pistus and pistor. See the context, Octavius, 14. 4 Lightfoot, Galatians, p. 159.