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The Bible, from first to last, insists upon personal righteousness. Common life, or society, teaches us also that a salvation that did not insist upon virtue would be the destruction of society in all its temporal interests. If heaven could be sustained and peopled by faith without good works, earth at least could not; it would be compelled to resort to moral lives. The doctrine of salvation by faith must therefore be so stated and held as to leave society its friend, trusting faith rather than fearing it, and must be so stated and held as to leave the other doctrines of Christianity some reason of existence. In their joy over the newly-discovered idea of salvation by the mediation of Christ, some of the divines around Luther, with Luther himself, declared that no amount of sin would imperil the soul that should possess this marvellous faith. Thus at one stroke the doctrines of regeneration, and repentance, and sanctification, and love to man, are cut-down as cumberers of the ground. The Bible is reduced to one sentence; its grateful music is silenced into one note, to be sounded evermore upon a single string. This discussion may now prepare us to hear the words of St. James, which so conflict with the Solitidian, words of our creeds. Faith, indeed, will save a soul, but faith then is not rigidly a belief; it is more, it is a friendship, for the word "belief" is often wholly omitted, and for whole pages the love for Christ reigns in its stead. In St. John the word "love" quite excludes the word "faith." Faith, therefore, being a devotion to a leader, a mere belief is nothing. A man is justified by his active affections, and not by his acquiescence in some principle. Thus faith, in the biblical sense, is not a simple belief, but a mystical union with Christ, such that the works of the Master are the joy of the disciple. Works, that is, results — a new life — are the destiny of faith, the reason of its wonderful play of light upon the religious horizon. If the New Testament is to be a place where "belief '"is a substitute for a moral life, then the uprightness of Job was not a shadow of our better era; but the spectacle is reversed, and we are the waning evening of a day whose purer sunlight fell thousands of years ago in the land of Uz. But we believe in no such retrograde of doctrine. We believe the righteousness of the Old Testament only a shadow of the great unfolding of the human heart, destined to issue out in the Sermon of the Mount. If the old law said, "Thou shalt not kill," it sounded only the first note in the music of a love which would do to others what it would theft others should do unto it. Indeed, the gospel is a perfect overflow of justice, of honour, of kindness, of active love. Its prayer is that men may be perfect, as the Father in heaven is perfect. But this spiritual condition will not become universal or even common, if the word "belief" is so magnified that the Church cannot see the human" righteousness" in its supreme beauty.

(D. Swing.)

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KJV: What doth it profit, my brethren, though a man say he hath faith, and have not works? can faith save him?

WEB: What good is it, my brothers, if a man says he has faith, but has no works? Can faith save him?