of low character may not be misled by the word Faith and ask useless questions.' 1

The English Reformers attempted no definition of Faith, and no definition is to be found in our Articles. But in the Homilies we read: A quick and living Faith is not only the common belief of the Articles of our faith, but it is also a true trust and confidence of the mercy of God through our Lord Jesus Christ, and a steadfast hope of good things to be received at God's hand.' The Homily goes on to say: 6 Dead Faith is not the sure and substantial Faith that saveth sinners. Another Faith there is in Scripture, which is not idle, unfruitful, dead, but worketh by charity, as St. Paul declareth.' 2 Elsewhere: There is one work in the which be all good works; that is, Faith that worketh by charity. If thou have it, thou hast the ground of all good works for the virtues of strength, wisdom, temperance, and justice, be all referred to this same Faith.'3 is a popular statement of a sound doctrine of Faith.

This

The difference between the Catholic and the Protestant view of Faith may be made clearer if I quote a few sentences in which Newman sums up his own view of Faith, in opposition to that of the Reformers. Justifying Faith is Faith developed into height and depth and breadth, as if in a bodily form; not as a picture but as an image; with a right side and a left, a without and a within; not a mere impression or sudden gleam of light upon the soul, not knowledge, or emotion, or conviction, which ends with itself, but the beginning of that which is eternal, the operation of the indwelling Power which acts from within us outwards and round about us, works in us mightily, so intimately with our will as to be in a true sense one with it; pours itself out into our whole mind, runs over into our thoughts, desires, feelings, purposes, attempts, and

1 Harnack, History of Dogma, vii. p. 255.

2 Sermon of Faith, Part I.

• Of Good Works, Part L

works, combines them all together into one, makes the whole man its one instrument, and justifies him into one holy gracious ministry, one embodied lifelong act of Faith, one sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is his reasonable service. Such is Faith . . . existing indeed in feelings, but passing on into acts, into victories of whatever kind over self. . . . These acts we sometimes call labours, sometimes endurances, sometimes confessions, sometimes devotions, sometimes services; but they are all instances of self-command, arising from Faith seeing the invisible world, and Love choosing it.' 1

Now hear Luther. Perhaps you will think that the difference is after all mainly one of emphasis. Faith is a divine work in us, through which we are changed and regenerated by God. Oh, it is a living, busy, active, powerful thing, this Faith, so that it is impossible for it not to do us good continually. Neither does it ask whether good works are to be done, but before one asks it has done them, and is doing them always. But any one who does not such works is an unbelieving man, who gropes and looks about him for Faith and good works, and knows neither what Faith is nor what good works are. Faith is a living, deliberate confidence in the grace of God, so certain that for it it could die a thousand deaths. And such confidence and knowledge of divine grace makes us joyous, brave, and cheerful towards God and all creation.' 2

In the nineteenth century, and at the present time, there has been and is much controversy about the meaning of Faith. In the popular teaching of the Roman Church there is a disastrous tendency to regard it as an act of violence exercised by the will upon the intellect, in obedience to external authority. The quotations from St. Thomas Aquinas, though they contain nothing to which we could object, show how easily this view might be taken. 1 Newman, Lectures on Justification, p. 302. 2 Luther, Preface to Epistle to the Romans.

But the Thomist philosophy was an honest attempt to place theology on a rational basis. At the present day, even so liberal a Romanist as Father Tyrrell can define Faith as voluntary certainty,' and as an actively free belief.' 'Under the force of evidence,' he says, 'our mind is passive and receptive like a mirror; but in the case of free assent, like Faith, we have to assert ourselves. A certain sense of unreality, one might almost say of pretence, is the normal and natural accompaniment of these freely chosen beliefs.' The difference between this and mere fictions or working hypotheses is that in the case of Faith we hold to the belief in obedience to the command of God as made known to us by the voice of conscience. But all this will not prevent that seeming black to us, which God tells us, and which we sincerely believe, to be white. Therefore a certain sense of unreality is part of the trial of Faith.' 'The great mass of our beliefs are reversible, and are dependent for their stability on the action or permission of the will.' I shall deal with this strange theory of Faith in a later lecture. Here I merely wish you to note its existence. It has had two logical and inevitable developments. With the help of the Kantian philosophy, or later systems based on Kant, the intellectual aspect of things has been disparaged, and the 'will-world' exalted to supremacy. All mere facts' being thus discredited in advance, Faith can create its own world with considerable independence. On the other side we see the larger and stronger party in the Roman Church scorning and prohibiting all attempts to accommodate dogmas to modern discoveries, and falling back upon implicit, unquestioning obedience to whatever the Church has chosen to declare.

We have now sketched the career of this remarkable word during the two thousand years of its life. IíσTIS— Fides Glaube-Faith: they are not exact equivalents; each has had a history of its own. The conception has been narrowed in various ways—now into bare assent,

now into bare trust and confidence in a divine Person; now into a subjective assurance which claims to be its own evidence; now into vague feeling; now into a cheerful optimistic outlook upon the world; now into implicit obedience and submission to authority. It will be my object in these Lectures to do justice to the partial truth contained in these various one-sided views, while exposing their limitations.

CHAPTER III

THE PRIMARY GROUND OF FAITH

WE have sketched the history of the word Faith and its cognates in the Bible and in the Church, and have shown how from the first it has been, for Christians, the accepted term for the religious temper traced back to its source. Faith, Hope, and Love, with Faith at the beginning, Hope in the middle, and Love at the end, as the crown and fulfilment of the other two-this is Christianity in a nutshell. And we have seen how the two meanings of intellectual conviction and moral trust, which both legitimately belong to the words TíσTIS, fides, Faith, and to the Christian virtue which they describe, were brought together in the New Testament, never again to be divided, but also never, as history shows, to work quite smoothly together. In this lecture I wish to approach our subject from a very different side the psychological-and ask, What is the primary ground of Faith, as a human faculty or state of consciousness?

What is the seat of Faith? Does it spring from the intellectual side of our nature ? Do we attain to Faith by carefully weighing the evidence for the existence of God, for a future life, for the Resurrection of Christ, or the Virgin Birth, or the historical accuracy of the narratives in the Old Testament? Or shall we, still within the province of the intellect, agree with Fichte that we are saved, not by history, but by metaphysics,' and base our Faith on the conclusions of some philosophical system? Or, with