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There are morbid growths in the human frame which our doctors divide into two groups — benign and malignant; and the distinction often comes to mean the distinction between life and death. In dealing with the unbelief which crosses our pathway and even creeps into our homes, it is most important that we should observe the same principle of minute and discriminating classification, and beware of confusing things that entirely differ. Some phases of scepticism are chiefly intellectual; morbid, weakening, and hurtful all the same: phases which begin to assume a moral complexion when a man parades them as a beggar parades his sores, and it may be frets and keeps them open when they tend to heal. And on the other hand there are scepticisms which are moral in their beginnings and which tend to destroy the most vital fibres of conscience and character.

1. Unbelief is malignant when it is a product of the flesh and its tyrannous appetites. Of that we have an instructive example in the text. Our fleshly passions always tend to make us distrustful of the spiritual and the unseen, and this drift in the passions sometimes warps the reason and deflects the moral sense, and has done so for generations, so that we inherit a maimed aptitude for faith. It is only by the subjugation of the flesh that we become susceptible of the faith that God seeks from us. Men may be mistrustful malcontents because they do not find themselves in the kind of world upon which they have set their foolish desire. The atheist is occasionally a person who cannot get all the beer he wants. Now and again men gnash their teeth upon religious belief because Divine law puts restraint upon their lusts and upholds the strict sanctities of marriage and the home. The ideal world that would convince them of the Maker's benevolence would be a world fluttering with hosts of unclaimed hours.

2. Another sign of malignant unbelief is that it thwarts men in working out the appointed problems of life and salvation. We find the scientific mind smouldering with resentment because unscientific definitions of the supernatural have been current in religious circles, just as if such accidents were of the essence of faith. The mind trained to methods of historical research is exasperated to contempt by the uncritical methods of pietists who do not grasp the human part in revelation, and the Bible is despised because of the narrowness and illiteracy of some good Christians who honour it. The man needs our richest pity over whom, for any of these reasons, the Bible has lost its authority. But the obligations of faith are first of all those which present themselves in the pathway of our common duty, and when those obligations are met, we shall probably find the further claim the Bible makes upon our faith easier of fulfilment

3. That unbelief is malignant which impeaches a God who is in the very act of proving His covenant and friendship with us and leading us forth into freedom, privilege, blessedness. Our vaunted doubt is an affront to a living Benefactor, a stab at the warm love that is ever brooding over us, a gross filial impiety; for the signs that our lives are under covenant guidance are as indisputable as those vouchsafed to Israel of old, however much they may differ in form. If you flatter yourself that it is only the God of an empty tradition you disparage in your modes of unbelief, you eliminate the most noteworthy facts from your experience of life, and judge with disastrous prejudice. God is nearer to us than all others, directing our steps to right ends, moulding our characters by wise chastisement, and clinging tenaciously to the faint promise of better things that may yet be in us; and it is all this which puts the culminating blackness upon our unbelief.

4. Unbelief is malignant when the most memorable experiences of our history furnish sufficient warrant for the faith we are required to exercise. Such was the case with Israel in the wilderness. Such unbelief as they avowed might have been less unseemly before the first plague alighted upon Egypt, and the first wonder had been wrought for their salvation. God never asks from men an arbitrary and impossible faith, and it will always be found that He has prepared us by the lessons of our previous history for the next heroic act of trust that is required. In God's order for our education in this cardinal virtue, the intricate, the complex, the formidable do not come first, although misguided men do not always respect God's order. The duties of faith are graded just as carefully as a child's scales in music or his first exercises in reading. The infant who can scarcely climb up-stairs is not set to scale Mount Ararat. God's providence puts the demands of faith in a rational series, and we must rise in harmony with our personal experience of His grace and power. High destinies are in store for you, and you must needs believe in God's continuous salvation through every step of your pilgrimage, and let Him shape the plan of it in His own way. Why should your whims and weaknesses and insistences forsooth be sacred in His sight? Be content to have them set aside. When you believe in God's salvation as it persists through your life and breaks out into floods of ever-growing illumination, you will find it easier to believe in the history of salvation preserved for us in the sacred book; and mounting those ascents of faith, made ready for your steps, you shall find that nothing is impossible to him that believeth.

(T. G. Selby.)

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KJV: Therefore the LORD heard this, and was wroth: so a fire was kindled against Jacob, and anger also came up against Israel;

WEB: Therefore Yahweh heard, and was angry. A fire was kindled against Jacob, anger also went up against Israel,