acceptance of men. He is embraced by the world no farther than he is embraced by individuals. He saves the world no farther than he saves individuals. He died for the world because he died for the individuals that compose the race. Evangelical faith, then, implies the belief of the truths of the Bible, the apprehension of the truths just named, and a reception of them, and a personal acceptance and appropriation of Christ to meet the necessities of the individual soul.

3. It implies the unreserved yielding up of the mind to Christ in the various relations in which he is presented in the gospel. These relations will come under review at another time; all I wish here to say is that faith is a state of committal to Christ, and of course it implies that the soul will be unreservedly yielded to him in all his relations to it so far and so fast as as these are apprehended by the intelligence.

4. Evangelical faith implies an evangelical life. This would not be true if faith were merely an intellectual state or exercise. But since, as we have seen, faith is of the heart, since it consists in the committal of the will to Christ, it folfows by a law of necessity that the life will correspond with faith.

5. Evangelical faith implies repentance towards God. Evangelical faith particularly respects Jesus Christ and his salvation. It is an embracing of Christ and his salvation. Of course it implies repentance towards God, that is, a turning from sin to God. The will can not be submitted to Christ, it can not receive him as he is presented in the gospel while it neglects repentance toward God; while it rejects the authority of the Father, it can not embrace and submit to the Son.

6. Evangelical faith implies a renunciation of self-righteousness. Christ's salvation is opposed to a salvation by law or or by self-righteousness. It is therefore impossible for one to embrace Christ as the Savior of the soul any further than he renounces all hope or expectation of being saved by his own works, or righteousness.

7. It implies the renunciation of the spirit of self-justification. The soul that receives Christ must have seen its lost estate. It must have been convinced of sin and of the folly and madness of attempting to excuse self. It must have renounced and abhorred all pleas and excuses in justification or extenuation of sin. Unless the soul coases to justify self,

it can not justify God, and unless it justifies God, it can not embrace the plan of salvation by Christ. A state of mind therefore that justifies God and condemns self, is always implied in evangelical faith.

8. Disinterested benevolence, or a state of good will to being, is implied in evangelical faith.

Evangelical faith is the committal of the soul to God and to Christ in all obedience. It must, therefore, imply fellowship or sympathy with Him in regard to the great end upon which his heart is set and for which he lives. A yielding up of the will and the soul to Him must imply the embracing of the same end that He embraces.

9. It implies a state of the sensibility corresponding to the truths believed. It implies this, because this state of the sensibility is a result of faith by a law of necessity, and this result follows necessarily upon the intellect's perceiving and the heart's embracing Christ and his gospel.

10. Of course it implies peace of mind. In Christ the soul finds its full and present salvation. It finds justification or a sense of pardon and acceptance. It finds sanctification or grace to deliver from the reigning power of sin. It finds all its wants met and all needed grace proffered for its assistance. It sees no cause for disturbance, nothing to ask or desire that is not treasured up in Christ. It has ceased to war with God-with itself. It has found its resting place in Christ, and rests in profound peace under the shadow of the Almighty.

11. It implies hope, as soon as the believing soul considers, that is, a hope of eternal life in and through Christ. It is impossible that the soul should embrace the gospel for itself and really accept of Christ without a hope of eternal life resulting from it by a necessary law.

12. It implies joy in God and in Christ. Peter speaks of joy as the unfailing accompaniment of faith, as resulting from it. Speaking of christians he says, 1 Pet., i, 5-9, "Who are kept by the power of God through faith unto salvation, ready to be revealed in the last time: wherein ye greatly rejoice, though now for a season (if need be) ye are in heavi ness through manifold temptations; that the trial of your faith, being much more precious than of gold that perisheth, though it be tried with fire, might be found unto praise, and honor, and glory, at the appearing of Jesus Christ: whom having not seen, ye love; in whom, though now ye see him

not, yet believing, ye rejoice with joy unspeakable, and full of glory: receiving the end of your faith, even the salvation. of your souls."

13. It implies zeal in the cause of Christ. Faith in Christ implies fellowship with Him in the great work of man's redemption, and of course must imply zeal in the same cause for which Christ gave up his life.

14. Evangelical faith must imply a general sympathy with Christ in respect to the affairs of his government. It must imply sympathy with his views of sin and of holiness-of sinners and of saints. It must imply a deep affection for and interest in Christ's people.

15. It must imply a deep interest in his gospel and in its spread and reception among men.

16. It must imply a consecration of heart, of time, of substance, and of all to this great end.

17. It must imply the existence in the soul of every virtue, because it is a yielding up of the whole being to the will of God. Consequently all the phases of virtue required by the gospel must be implied as existing either in a developed or in an undeveloped state, in every heart that truly receives Christ by faith. Certain forms or modifications of virtue may not in all cases have found the occasions of their development, but certain it is that every modification of virtue will manifest itself as its occasion shall arise if there be a true and a living faith in Christ. This follows from the very nature of faith.

18. Present evangelical faith implies a state of present sinlessness. Observe: Faith is the yielding and committal of the whole will and of the whole being to Christ. This and nothing short of this is evangelical faith. But this comprehends and implies the whole of present, true obedience to Christ. This is the reason why faith is spoken of as the condition and as it were the only condition, of salvation. It really implies all virtue. Faith may be contemplated either as a distinct form of virtue. and as an attribute of love, or as comprehensive of all virtue. When contemplated as an attribute of love, it is only a branch of sanctification. When contemplated in the wider sense of universal conformity of will to the will of God, it is then synonymous with entire present sanctification. Contemplated in either light its existence in the heart must be inconsistent with present sin there. Faith is an attitude of the will, and is wholly incompatible with present rebellion of will against Christ. This must be true, or what is faith?

19. Faith implies the reception and the practice of all known or perceived truth. The heart that embraces and receives. truth as truth and because it is truth, must of course receive all known truth. For it is plainly impossible that the will should embrace some truth perceived for a benevolent reason and reject other truth perceived. All truth is harmonious. One truth is always consistent with every other truth. The heart that truly embraces one, will for the same reason embrace all truth known. If out of regard to the highest good of being any one revealed truth is truly received, that state of mind continuing, it is impossible that all truth should not be received as soon as known.

IV. WHAT UNBELIEF IS NOT.

1. It is not ignorance of truth. Ignorance is a blank; it is the negation or absence of knowledge. This certainly can not be the unbelief every where represented in the Bible as a heinous sin. Ignorance may be a consequence of unbelief, but can not be identical with it. We may be ignorant of certain truths as a consequence of rejecting others, but this ignorance is not, and, as we shall see, can not be unbelief.

2. Unbelief is not the negation or absence of faith. This were a mere nothing-a nonentity. But a mere nothing is not that abominable thing which the Scriptures represent as a great and a damning sin.

3. It can not be a phenomenon of the intelligence or an intellectual skepticism. This state of the intelligence may result from the state of mind properly denominated unbelief, but it can not be identical with it. Intellectual doubts or unbelief often does result from unbelief properly so called, but unbelief when contemplated as a sin, should never be confounded with theoretic or intellectual infidelity. They are as entirely distinct as any two phenomena of mind whatever.

4. It cannot consist in feelings or emotions of incredulity, doubt, or opposition to truth. In other words unbelief as a sin, can not be a phenomenon of the sensibility. The term unbelief is sometimes used to express or designate a state of the intelligence and sometimes of the sensibility. It some times is used to designate a state of intellectual incredulity, doubt, distrust, skepticism. But when used in this sense moral character is not justly predicable of the state of mind which the term unbelief represents.

Sometimes the term expresses a mere feeling of incredulity in regard to truth. But neither has this state of mind moral

character; nor can it have, for the very good reason that it is involuntary. In short, the unbelief that is so sorely denounced in the Bible as a most aggravated abomination, can not consist in any involuntary state of mind whatever.

V. WHAT UNBELIEF IS.

1. The term as used in the Bible, in those passages that represent it as a sin, must designate a phenomenon of will. It must be a voluntary state of mind. It must be the opposite of evangelical faith. Faith is the will's reception and unbelief is the will's rejection of truth. Faith is the soul's confiding in truth and in the God of truth. Unbelief is the soul's withholding confidence from truth and the God of truth. It is the heart's rejection of evidence and a refusal to be influenced by it. It is the will in the attitude of opposition to truth perceived, or evidence presented. It must be a voluntary state or attitude of the will as distinguished from a mere volition or executive act of the will. Volition may and often does give forth through words and deeds, expressions and manifestations of unbelief. But the volition is only a result of unbelief and not identical with it. Unbelief is a deeper and more efficient state of mind than mere volition. It is the will in its profoundest opposition to the truth and will of God.

VI. WHAT IS IMPLIED IN UNBELIEF.

If

1. Unbelief implies light or the perception of truth. unbelief were but a mere negation an absence of faith a quiescent or inactive state of the will, it would not imply the perception of truth. But since unbelief consists in the will's rejection of truth, the truth rejected must be perceived. For example: the heathen who have never heard of the gospel are not properly guilty of unbelief in not embracing it. They are indeed guilty of unbelief in rejecting the light of nature. They are entirely without the light of the gospel; that, therefore, they can not reject. The unbelief so much complained of in the Bible, is not ignorance, but a rejection of truth revealed.

2. It implies obstinate selfishness. Indeed it is only one of the attributes of selfishness as we have seen on a former occasion. Selfishness is a spirit of self-seeking. It consists in the will's committing itself to self-gratification or self-indulgence. Now unbelief is only selfishness contemplated in its relations to the truth of God. It is only the resistance