Section 8.

SECTION 8.

The reasonableness of the doctrine of salvation by faith is farther evinced by a variety of arguments. How much we are indebted to the Solifidians for having firmly stood up in defence of faith. How dearly they have made us pay for that service, when they have so enforced our eleventh article, which guards salvation by faith, as to make void the twelfth, which guards morality: and why the overpowering splendour of truth is qualified by some shades. SHOULD some readers still think that it is unreasonable to dwell first upon faith, and to insist more upon it than upon the other works and graces which adorn the life and character of a Christian; to remove their scruples, and to vindicate more fully the fundamental doctrine of salvation by faith, I present them with the following remarks: —

1. If true faith is the root that produces hope, charity, and sincere obedience, as the preceding section evinces, is it not reasonable principally to urge the necessity of believing aright? The end of all preaching is undoubtedly to plant the tree of evangelical obedience; and how can that tree be planted but by its root? Was a gardener ever charged with unreasonableness, for not setting a tree by the branches?

2. If faith working by love is the heart of true religion, should we not bestow our chief attention and care upon it? Suppose you were a physician, and attended a patient, who had an imposthume in his stomach and another on his hand; would you do honour to your skill, if overlooking the internal mischief you confined your attention to the external ulcer?

3. The most excellent gift of God to man, next to the invaluable gifts of his Son and Spirit, is that of saving truth. Nay, the Son of God, in his prophetic character, came only to display the truth. He was manifested in the flesh to be its herald among men. St. Paul tells us that “Christ witnessed a good confession before Pilate;” and St. John informs us that part of this confession ran thus: “To this end was I born, and for this cause came I into the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth.” Now if “bearing witness to the truth” was a great “cause,” and a peculiar “end” of our Lord’s coming into the world; if the Spirit itself is called the “Spirit of truth,” because his grand office is to reveal and seal the truth; if truth is no better than error to us, till we receive it by faith; and if the Scripture declares four times that “the just shall live by his faith,” a declaration this which St. Paul confirms by his own experience, when he says, “I live by faith;” is it not evident that when we practically reject the doctrine of faith, we reject life, together with all the blessings which are “brought to light by the Gospel;” a Gospel disbelieved being undoubtedly a Gospel rejected?

4. Our feelings and conduct greatly depend upon our apprehensions of things. A false report that your son is dead reaches your ears; you believe it, and pangs of grief distract your breast. Soon after a true account of his being drowned is brought to you; you disbelieve it, and you remain unaffected. A diamond by moonlight glitters at your feet; you think it is only a glow worm, and this mistake prevents your stooping to pick it up. A glow worm shines at some distance; you fancy that it is a diamond, and you run to it with a degree of hope and joy proportionable to the degree of your vain confidence. The God of truth is an infinite, spiritual diamond, if I may use the expression; and yet so faint are our ideas of his excellence that we overlook him, and madly run after deceitful objects, the brightest of which are but glow worms to the “Father of lights.” Nothing, therefore, but a firm “belief of the truth,” stamping our souls with just apprehensions of things, and fixing in us a strong persuasion of their intrinsic worth or vanity, can rectify our judgment, and make us regulate our conduct according to the dictates of God’s word, which are invariably one with the truth, and with the nature of things.

5. When St. Paul exhorts his converts to the pursuit of things “honest, just, pure, lovely,” &c, he mentions first, with great propriety, “whatsoever things are true.” For as soon as obedient faith allows truth to sit upon the throne, there is an end of mental anarchy: all things resume their proper ranks and places. Creatures, in a great degree, disappear before their Creator; earth before heaven; and time before eternity. Thus Satan’s charm is broken, God begins to be to us what he is in himself, “all in all;” and when we see him such, if our faith be lively and practical, we treat him as such: we answer the end of our creation’ truth prevails: “Satan falls as lightning from heaven:” man is man, and God is God.

6. If truth, next to God, is the most powerful thing in the world; if we can have no communion with God but by the medium of truth; if falsehood is the rankest poison in hell; and if we take a draught of this poison as often as we take in a capital religious error; can you reasonably explode the doctrine of salvation by faith, since the office of living faith is to expel the poison of destructive error, and to receive the reviving, healing, strengthening cordial of Gospel truth?

7. If an unfeigned faith in the truths which God reveals under one or another of his evangelical dispensations is the instrumental cause of all our good works, while a cordial consent to one or more of Satan’s lies is the parent of all our bad actions; if these two springs move every wheel of righteousness and of iniquity in the world; is it not highly consistent with reason to mind them first? Would you not pity your watch maker if he so regarded the hand and dial plate of your watch as to forget the wheel work and spring? And can you approve the method of Honestus, who insists upon good works, without ever touching upon the principles of sincere obedience, and upon faith, which is the spring that sets all in motion?

8. Again: if Abraham, by “not staggering at the promise of God through unbelief, and by being strong in faith, gave glory to God,” and “set to his seal that God is true;” if you cannot honour a superior more than by receiving his every word with respectful confidence, and moving at his every beck with obedient alacrity; and if faith thus honours God, why should you refuse it the first place among the graces which support and adorn the Church militant? Especially since the Lord declares that “the pure in heart shall see God,” and that our “hearts are purified by faith;” and since the Scriptures testify that “without holiness no man shall see the Lord,” and that we “are sanctified through faith that is in him.”

9. All fulness dwells in God; creatures, abstracted from the Divine plenitude, are mere emptiness. Rational creatures, in their most perfect state, are only moral vessels, filled with the grace of God, and reflecting the light of Divine truth. Now if we can be saved any other way than “by grace through [obedient] faith,” that is, by freely receiving the grace and light of God, through the practical belief of the truth proposed to us; if we are in any degree saved by our proper merit through faithless works; we may indulge Pharisaic boasting. But God does not so give his glory to human worms; therefore such a boasting is excluded by the law of faith; and the apostle wisely observes that salvation “is of faith, that it may be by grace;” the justifying faith of sinners always implying a cordial acknowledgment of their sin and misery, and a hearty recourse to “the tender mercy of our God, whereby the day spring from on high hath visited us,” more or less clearly, according to the dispensation we are under. f126

10. The manner in which faith and its works “exclude boasting,” may be illustrated by a comparison. A beggar lies dying at your door, you offer him a cordial, he takes it, revives, and works. A deserter is going to be shot, you bring him a pardon from the king, if he will receive it with grateful humility; he does so, join his regiment, and fights with such courage that he is promoted. Now, in these cases, it is evident that Pharisaic f127 boasting is excluded. If the beggar live ever so long, and work ever so hard, — if the deserter fight ever so manfully, and be raised ever so high; yet they can never say that their doings have procured them the life which they enjoy; for, before they did such works, that life was graciously given, or restored to them, upon the easy terms of confidently taking a remedy, and humbly accepting a pardon offered: The application is easy. By our fallen nature we are “conceived in sin, and children of wrath:” God freely gives us the light of life in Jesus Christ; faith, without necessity, humbly receives it, and works by it; the believer therefore, can never be so unreasonable and ungrateful as to suppose that his working merited him “the light of life,” by which he began to work righteousness. So long as he deserves the name of a believer, he knows, he feels, that his faith is, in the first place, a mere receiver. “What hast thou that thou hast not received?” roars like thunder in the ears of a lively faith, and like lightning strikes dead the Pharisaic boast.

11. I say that “faith is, in the first place, a mere receiver.” This deserves attention. If we consider faith as a conduit pipe, which at one end receives the truth and power of God, and at the other end refunds those living streams to water the garden of the Lord; we may with propriety compare that mother grace to the pipe of a watering pot, which at the internal, unseen opening, receives the water that is in the pot; and at the external, visible perforations, returns it and forms artificial showers over the drooping plants. According to the doctrine of grace, maintained by the Solifidians, faith does nothing but receive the grace of God through Christ; and according to the doctrine of works, maintained by the moralists, faith is a mere bestower; but, according to the Gospel of Christ, which embraces and connects the two extremes of truth, faith is first an humble, passive receiver, and then a cheerful, active bestower: it receives grace and truth, and returns love and good works. In that respect, it resembles the heart which continually receives the blood from the veins, and returns it into the arteries. If the heart cease either to receive or to return the blood, (no matter which,) its motion and our animal life are soon at an end; and if faith cease either to receive grace, or to return good works, its motion and its life soon terminate in spiritual death, according to the doctrine of St. James. If the Solifidians and moralists candidly looked at faith in this rational and Scriptural light, they would soon embrace the whole Gospel, and one another. By considering faith as a receiver, according to the first Gospel axiom, Honestus would avoid the Pharisaic extreme; and by viewing it as a bestower, according to the second Gospel axiom, Zelotes would avoid the Antinomian delusion; and both would jointly recommend the humble, cheerful, consistent passiveness and activity of Bible believers.

12. “If we receive the witness of men,” says St. John, “the witness of God is greater: for [under the Christian dispensation] this is the witness of God which he hath testified of his Son: he that believeth on the Son of God hath the testimony in himself; but he that believeth not God hath made him a liar, because he believed not the record that God gave of his Son.” Upon these awful words I raise the following argument: —

If a state of absolute doubt is quite unnatural: if it is almost impossible to keep the balance of our judgment unturned for one hour, with respect to all saving truths and destructive lies: if the stream of life, which hurries us along, calls us every moment to action: if we continually do good or bad works: if good works certainly spring from saving faith, and bad works from destructive unbelief: if skeptics are only so in imagination, theory, and profession: if our daily conduct demonstrates whether our heart inclines most to the lies of Satan, or to the truths of God: and if the moment we practically reject God’s truths, we embrace the lies of the god of this world, and by that mean take him for our god; — if, I say, this is the case, what reasonable man can be surprised to hear the mild Jesus say, “He that believeth not shall be damned?” Can there be a greater sin — a sin more productive of all iniquity, and more horrid, than to make the lying devil a god, and the true God a liar? Nevertheless, dreadful to say! this double crime is actually committed by all that live in wilful, practical unbelief; and the commission of it is indirectly recommended by all those who decry the doctrine of salvation by faith.

Lastly. If our first parents fell by believing the gross lies told them by the serpent, is God unreasonable to raise us, by making us believe the great truths peculiar to our dispensation, that the Divine leaven of sincerity and truth may counterwork and at last expel the satanic leaven of malice and wickedness? Who ever thought it absurd in a physician to proportion the remedy to the disease, the antidote to the poison? And why should even the incarnation of the Son of God appear a mean too wonderful for an end so important? Why should it be thought incredible that the Son of God, who, as our Creator, is far more nearly related to us than our natural parents, should have graciously stooped as low as the human nature to redeem us; when Satan wantonly stooped as low as the beastly nature to tempt us? On the contrary, is it not absurd to suppose that hellish, wanton malice has done more to destroy, than heavenly, creating love to save the children of men? For my part, the more I compare the genuine Gospel with the nature of things, the more I admire their harmony; wondering equally at the prejudices of those hasty professors who pour perpetual contempt upon reason, to keep their irrational opinions in countenance; and at the unreasonableness of those pretended votaries of reason, who suppose that the doctrine of salvation by faith is incompatible with good sense. OBJECTION. “But,” says an objector, “if unfeigned faith, or a cordial belief of the truth, instrumentally turns us ‘from the power of Satan to God;’ why have you published tracts against the Solifidians whose favourite doctrine is, ‘Believe; he that believeth hath everlasting life?’” ANSWER. By the preceding pages it is evident that we do not differ from the Solifidians when they preach salvation by faith in a rational and a Scriptural manner. So long at they do this, we wish them good luck in the name of the Lord. Nay, I publicly return them my sincere thanks for the bold stand they have made for faith, when the floods of Pharisaic ungodliness lifted up their voice against that mother grace, and threatened to destroy her with all her offspring. But, alas! how dear have they made us pay for that service, when they have asserted or insinuated that true faith is inamissible, that it can live in a heart totally depraved, that a man’s faith can be good when his actions are bad, detestable, diabolical; in a word, that true Christians may go any length in sin, may plunge into adultery, murder, or incest, and even proceed to the open worship of devils, like Solomon, without losing their title to a throne of glory, and their justifying, sanctifying, saving faith!

This they have done in flat opposition to our Lord’s doctrine: “A good tree bringeth not forth corrupt fruit; neither does a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit; for every tree is known by its own fruit,” Luke 6:43. And this some of them seem determined to do, to the stumbling of the judicious, the deceiving of the simple, and the hardening of infidels; notwithstanding our twelfth article, which strongly guards the doctrine of faith against their Solifidian error. “Good works” says our Church in that truly anti- Calvinistic article, “do [at this present time] spring out necessarily of a true and lively faith, [and consequently bad works, of a false and dead faith;] insomuch that by them a lively [and by bad works a dead] faith may be as evidently known, as a tree is discerned by the fruit.”

But, in the meantime, how do they evade the force of that article? Why, thus: David bears this year the fruit of adultery, hypocrisy, treachery, and murder, before all his kingdom: last year he bore the fruit of chastity, sincerity, truth, and brotherly love. However, according to the Crispian doctrines of grace, David must be a tree of righteousness now, as much as when he bore the fruits of righteousness. If this be not the case, Mr. Fulsome’s Gospel will be false: now this must not be. That Gospel must stand. “But if it stand, our twelfth article falls to the ground.” O! we can prop it by saying, that though a child of God, a tree of righteousness, may now produce adultery, &c, &c, &c, yet he will certainly produce good fruit again by and by. To this salvo I answer, that the article has only two grand designs; the one inseparably to connect a lively faith and good works, and the other to indicate the manner in which I may know whether I have a lively or a dead faith. Now, if I may have a lively faith while I commit adultery, &c, &c, &c, it evidently follows,

(1.) That the necessary connection between a lively faith and good works is totally lost.

(2.) That adultery and murder may denote a lively faith as well as purity and love. And,

(3.) That our twelfth article has not even the worth of a nose of wax, and may be burned with St. James’ Epistle, as an article “of straw.” And yet these gentlemen are the persons that represent themselves as the only fair subscribers to our articles, and charge us with prevarication for taking the seventeenth article in connection with the sixth, the twelfth, the sixteenth, and the thirty-first, as well as with the latter part of that article itself, which demands that the election it speaks of be understood of conditional election!

To return. Should the reader object, that “if God had suspended our salvation upon our practical belief of the truth, he would have put so conspicuous a badge upon the saving truth peculiar to each dispensation that nobody could have mistaken it for error, enthusiasm, priestcraft, or nonsense:” I answer —

1. God, having decreed to prove the loyalty and moral sagacity of his rational creatures, could not but place them in circumstances in which they might have an opportunity of exerting themselves. If hares were chained at the doors of dog kennels, what sagacity could hounds manifest above mastiffs? And if the deepest truths always lay within the reach of the most besotted souls, what advantage would candid, diligent inquirers have over those who wrap their minds in the veil of prejudice, and stupidly compose themselves to sleep in the arms of ignorance and sloth?

2. God will reward us according to our works of faith; but if the truth were attended with an irresistible energy, if it shone always upon our minds as transcendently bright as the dazzling sun does sometimes upon our faces, would God display his wisdom in rewarding us for confessing it? Did he, did any man in his senses, ever offer to reward us for believing that a bright luminary rules the day, when its meridian glory overpowers our sight?

3. Pearls are found in the bottom of the sea. Gold and diamonds lie generally deep in the earth. We sink pits to a prodigious depth only to come at the black mineral which we burn. Thousands of men go as far as the East and West Indies to fill our canisters with tea and sugar. Our meanest tradesmen sip the dews of both hemispheres at a breakfast. And yet, it may be, with a dish of tea in our hand, and a gold ring on our finger, we gravely complain that saving truth lies a great way off, and that God is unjust in placing it in obscure mines, which cannot be worked without some trouble and industry.

4. But although nobody can be established in the truth without “labouring for the meat that endureth for everlasting life;” yet God’s terms of salvation are not so hard as some prejudiced people conceive. Nor do I scruple to assert, that if we could read the hearts of all men, we would see, that, for a time, unbelievers take as much pains to exclude the light of truth as believers do to welcome it, and that wicked men work as intensely, though not as intentionally, to make their reprobation and damnation certain, as good men do “to make their calling and election sure:” for “the wicked is snared in the work of his own hands. The reward of his hands shall be given him. The wages of [his] sin is death; [and he frequently toils like a horse for his wages,] drawing iniquity with cords of vanity, [and] sin as with a cart rope,” to hale himself and others into the burning lake. From the preceding answers I conclude, that God, who makes the golden light of the sun and the silver light of the moon succeed each other, and who wisely tempers the blaze of a summer’s day by the mildness of the starry night, with equal wisdom qualifies the blaze of the day of truth by the mild obscurity of a night of probation; not only that the flaming truth may be more delightful at its return, but also that there may be room left for a gentle trial of our faith, and for the reasonable rewardableness of our works of faith.