1. There can be no mistake as to whether a man is possessed of faith. “By their fruits ye shall know them.” (Mat_7:16; Mat_7:20) It is not easy—it is, in fact, often impossible—to tell what a man believes, in the ordinary sense of the word; for he may say he believes one thing, when all the time he knows he believes another; he may even think he believes something, when in reality he does not. But, just as it would be absurd for us to make asseverations of bravery, when we were visibly trembling at the very smell of powder, so is it ridiculous to profess a confidence that God will render to every man according to his works, when we are acting as if this were, to say the least, unlikely. He who is confident cannot act as if he were in doubt. Faith made Moses refuse to be called the son of Pharaoh’s daughter; it led him to despise the treasure in Egypt, and to set at naught the wrath of the king. It inspired men with such courage and strength that they subdued kingdoms, escaped the edge of the sword, turned to flight the armies of the aliens; or, if it were otherwise ordained—if they were tortured, stoned, sawn asunder—it helped them to bear their agony without a murmur. It enabled the Hebrew Christians originally to endure their great conflict of sufferings, and to take joyfully the spoiling of their goods; it would help them, in the future, says the writer, to run with patience the race set before them, and, in their striving against sin, to resist unto blood—that is, to the extent even of laying down their lives.
We believe Christ because we can test the power of His life in our lives and because we can see whether His highest claim is true. He professes to be able to take a man who has lived in sin, who has been self-centred and absorbed in self, who has borne all the marks of the earthly, and given no promise of the heavenly life, and to transform him into a being of the spiritual order, glowing with love, forgetful of self, dying to live, and living to do the will of another, and with a life in parallelism with the Divine purpose. In short, He claims to be able to impart the Divine life to men, to spiritualize and transform their lives.
It is a claim which can be as carefully tested as the law of gravitation. How do you know there is such a law? You see every particle of matter in the universe obey it. It swings satellites and planets and by it you can calculate their motions and positions. It draws the whole ocean and dashes it twice a day high up the beach and you can announce weeks before the exact moment of flood-tide.
How do we know that Jesus Christ is the power of God unto salvation and that God’s love comes through Him to us? There is one sure test. Try Him. Turn your face to Christ, obey every call from Him, make an experiment of following Him completely, trust Him as you trust the laws of nature, throw yourself upon Him in absolute confidence, act as though you saw Him standing by you. The result will be—the testimony is universal—that you will find a new creation going on within. The old nature will go as the ghostly leaves of winter go when the new buds open. The new nature will come as “noiselessly as the springtime her crown of verdure weaves.” New avenues of activity will open, life will become richer, the reality of God will stand no more in theory, heaven will not seem some far-off terminus, and God’s will will cease to be some stubborn objective law; it will become an inward choice and pleasure.
Such a Christianity has a three-fold demonstration: its effect on other individuals, its effect on our own personal lives, and its transforming effect on society. No one who has ever seen a saint made by the power of God in Jesus Christ can doubt that there is something dynamic in such a religion. One may doubt the truth of transubstantiation, or question the value of outward baptism, but he knows that only a spiritual power can change hate to love, sullenness to sweetness, harshness to gentleness, impulsiveness to calm patience, and fretful discouragement to confidence and victory.
Then comes the first-hand evidence in one’s own life. There can be no proof so convincing as the fact that He has drawn me out of the horrible pit and the miry clay. He has established my goings and put a new song in any mouth. We know that we are of God because we love, because we have the witness, because we overcome, because God has brought us up into His life. Then there is that slow but steady coming of the Kingdom, going on before the eyes of those who can see—the propagation of the Divine life through the world. “The dial plate marks centuries with the minute finger.” It seems like the slow swing of the globe in the precession of the equinoxes which in a thousand years gives us a new pole star. But though slow, like the motion of the glacier, the movement of God in history toward “one far off divine event” is unmistakable and irresistible. The old corrupt order does change, the relics of a pagan age are weeded out, the entrenched evils of centuries finally do yield. New revelations come, prophets appear, the horizon of light enlarges. Men become more civilized, more humanized, more spiritualized, more Christlike. The New Jerusalem is something more than a dream, because God is at work in His world, and when we take long perspectives we trace His hand.
I could cite many instances where faith in Christ has very apparently altered a man’s whole outlook and action. Naturally, most of my observation has been among fishermen, and it has included men of almost every kind of temperament. One was a man with whom I afterwards made several voyages. A man of exceptionable physique, he had been the victim of uncontrollable temper, and various of his drinking sprees had ended in the police station as the result of violent assaults on others. He bad destroyed his home and his wife had left him. He was rapidly ruining his own splendid physique, and the lives of all those with whom he came in contact. Suddenly he became sober and peaceful, built up his home again and took back his wife, and developed an absolutely unselfish passion to try to save his fellows from the slavery that had been his. He always claimed that his faith in Christ was the secret of the change.
He was so cheerful and so uniformly optimistic that his very face became transparent with happiness, and I have never had a more delightful shipmate. I once asked him to say a word to encourage other men. He stood up to try, and unaccustomed tears coursed down his cheeks. At last he said, “To think of the like of me talking to them men,” and sat down. This class of men has been well illustrated by Mr. Harold Begbie in his Twice-born Men and Broken Earthenware. In my own experience it has been multiplied many times. Indeed, I have often wondered why so many clergy and other workers have asked me whether I have read these books, as if the results they describe were rare experiences. It is only the recording of them that is rare. There is a reticence always on the part of all good workers to draw deductions from their own work prematurely. There can be no question of their occurrence, however, though my own experience shows me that these more emotionally susceptible men are most liable to temporary retrogression. But even so, I am devoutly thankful for such changes as may occur to change their life and environment, changes which I can attribute to nothing else but their faith. I am certain that any one who, even though without faith himself, though also without prejudice, would seek to record such cases in the way we record cures of disease—which only affect part of men’s lives—would be surprised at the extent and value of suddenly acquired faith in the Christ. [Note: W. T. Grenfell, The Adventure of Life, 21.]
When St. Teresa’s superiors tried to persuade her that her early visions were delusive, she allowed that she might mistake one person for another. “But if this person left behind him jewels as pledges of his love, and I found myself rich having before been poor, I could not believe, even if I wished, that I had been mistaken. And these jewels I could show them; for all who knew me saw clearly that my soul was changed; the difference was great and palpable.” [Note: W. M. Macgregor, Christian Freedom, 148.]
2. Of the fruits of faith we may name—
(1) HUMILITY.—As necessary as the root to the plant, as necessary as the foundation to the structure, so is humility to the organism of the Christian character. It is humility at the basis of all other characteristics that gives its peculiar quality to strictly Christian virtue; to the courage, for example, to the endurance, to the purity of principle, to the hatred of evil in every form, which is shown by the true disciple. And the true secret for the presence and growth of true humility resides just here, in the felt and cherished fact of an entire dependence upon Another, and that Other—Jesus Christ. It is no product of an artificial and studied self-abasement, an elaborate practice of certain definite humiliations. Such things, especially when they take shape in acts and practices which in the least degree tend to make a display of “voluntary humility” (Col_2:18), can very easily slide into a subtle but dangerous form of self-exaltation, hard, cold, ambitious, untrue, tainted with a pharisaic readiness to compare self favourably, however secretly, with others.
But the humility “which is from above” is a very different thing. It rises out of a close contact between the disciple and the Master, the vassal and his Lord. That contact keeps the man always and naturally low and little in his own esteem, yet in a manner which has not the slightest connexion with debasement. It means the habitual consciousness of an immeasurable difference, an infinite superiority in the glorious other Person. But this consciousness is so vitally penetrated with a concurrent certainty of connexion, of affinity, that there is nothing in it of repulsion. Rather it involves an indescribable attraction, and the reception into the whole humbled being of the uplifting and ennobling “power of Christ.”
(2) LOVE.—The real Christian is the man who has got, and is using, a new power to love. Any one who calls himself a Christian, and is not practising love in his dealings with others, is simply deceiving himself. Let none say that “love,” so frequent and so much insisted upon in the First Epistle of John, has some technical and sublimated meaning, such as “love for souls.” The writer knows nothing of a love for souls which is not also a love for bodies. Ile takes pains to show exactly what he is talking about; the love that seeks to supply a brother’s physical needs (1Jn_3:17); the love that stops at nothing short of “laying down our lives for the brethren” (1Jn_3:16).
There is, of course, all the difference in the world between the selfish and the unselfish varieties of love. The love of the drunkard and the sensualist is not here in question. It is not the love that seeks to get, but the love that seeks to give; that finds its satisfaction, not in clutching at the loved object, but in pouring self out for its welfare. It is the love that Jesus showed for the leper and the lunatic; the love that won the heart of Zacchaeus, that made children feel happy when His arms were round them, that forgave His tormentors on the Cross.
To be a Christian, says the apostle, is to possess and to use this power of loving men: to have one’s nature filled with love, that is to say, with God (1Jn_4:7-8). And this is only developing the teaching which in the Gospels is attributed to the Master Himself. It is those who share the universal spirit of the Father, and love even their enemies, who “become” His children (Mat_5:44-48); it is only as we forgive others that we ourselves can be forgiven (Mat_6:14-15); it is those who minister to the needs of their fellow-men who will inherit the Kingdom (Mat_25:40); it is by love to one another that the disciples of Jesus are to be recognized (Joh_13:35).
The Christian loves; therefore he has the truth. His proof is not of a nature to be communicated by words; but neither can words take it away. You cannot prove to him that he does not love God; and if he loves God, will you dare to insist that he does not know Him? I have already asked it once, and I ask it again: Can he who loves God be deceived; is he not in the truth? And if Christianity alone gives him power to love God, is not Christianity exclusively the truth? Such is the certainty in which the faithful rejoice. I do not add that it is cherished and quickened by the Holy Spirit. I only speak of obvious facts, facts respecting which the unbelieving as well as the believing can satisfy themselves. And I limit myself to saying that the faith of the true Christian has for its peculiar characteristics a certainty which elevates it above that of any other belief. [Note: A. Vinet, Vital Christianity, 114.]
Where was the recognition of the solidarity of the race before the parable of the Good Samaritan? Where was the urging of the obligations of us all to provide for the survival, not of the fittest, but of the unfittest, before the “inasmuch” of the 25th of St. Matthew? Where were the altruistic virtues before the Divine self-devotion of Calvary? Are a Curtius and a Regulus cited in reply? The faith of a Christian requires the like at the hands of all its children, and the Word of Truth has begotten hundreds of thousands, since, in the earliest of its progeny, it “begat the first fruits of its creatures.”
Where was philanthropy before Barnabas, and Dorcas, and St. Martin of Tours? Where were the sick poor before God in Christ “bare our sicknesses and carried our sorrows” (Isa_53:4)? Who founded hospitals before a Christian Valens or Fabiola? Does our classical friend, dipping into his Grote, hint at Epidaurus and its temple-hospital? Let him dip a trifle deeper, until he sees every dying patient ruthlessly turned out, to die a little sooner of exposure and neglect lest a death within doors should discredit the institution and pollute the precincts of the God. Where is your non-Christian Elizabeth of Hungary, Wilberforce, Howard, Nightingale, Baroness Burdett-Coutts, Shaftesbury, Father Damien? Did all these, and hundreds more, bind as a phylactery between their eyes, and as a sign upon their right hands, the 13th of the let of Corinthians, after binding in a bundle and burning the 15th and the four Gospels? [Note: A. Pearson, The Claims of the Faith, 107.]
