with some evil thing that,
unless we are instantaneously on our guard, will conquer us almost
before we know. Evil tempts us because it comes to us, for the most
part, without any beat of drum or blast of trumpet to say that it is
coming, and to put us upon our guard. The batteries that do most harm to
the advancing force are masked until the word of command is given, and
then there is a flash from every cannon's throat and a withering hail of
shot that confounds by its unexpectedness as well as kills by its blow.
The fiery darts that light up the infernal furnace in a man's heart, and
that smite him all unawares and unsuspecting, these are the weapons that
we have to fear most.

II. Consider next, the defence: 'the shield of faith.'

Now, the Old Testament says things like this: 'Fear not, Abraham; I am
thy Shield.' The psalmist invoked God, in a rapturous exuberance of
adoring invocations, as his fortress, and his buckler, and the horn of
his salvation, and his high tower. The same psalm says, 'The Lord is a
shield to all them that put their trust in Him'; and the Book of
Proverbs, which is not given to quoting psalms, quotes that verse.
Another psalm says, 'The Lord God is a sun and shield.'

And then Paul comes speaking of 'the shield of _faith_.' What has become
of the other one? The answer is plain enough. My faith is nothing except
for what it puts in front of me, and it is God who is truly my shield;
my faith is only called a shield, because it brings me behind the bosses
of the Almighty's buckler, against which no man can run a tilt, or into
which no man can strike his lance, nor any devil either. God is a
defence; and my trust, which is nothing in itself, is everything because
of that with which it brings me into connection. Faith is the condition,
and the only condition, of God's power flowing into me, and working in
me. And when that power flows into me, and works in me, then I can laugh
at the fiery darts, because 'greater is He that is with us than all they
that are with them.'

So all the glorification which the New Testament pours out upon the act
of faith properly belongs, not to the act itself, but to that with which
the act brings us into connection. Wherefore, in the first Epistle of
John, the Apostle, who recorded Christ's saying, 'Be of good cheer; I
have overcome the world,' translates it into, 'This is the victory that
overcometh the world'--_not_, our Christ, but--'even our faith.' And it
ov