hom,' with all the disabilities and pains and absence, 'yet
believing,' you can put out a long arm of faith across the gulf that
lies, not only between to-day and eighteen centuries ago, but the deeper
and more impassible gulf that lies between earth and heaven, and clasp
Christ with a really firm grasp, which will fill the hand, and which we
shall feel has laid hold of something, or rather has laid hold of a
living person and a loving heart. That is faith. The Apostle uses a very
strong form of expression here, which is only very partially represented
by our English version. He does not say only '_in_ whom believing,' but
'_towards_ whom'; putting emphasis upon the effort and direction of the
faith, rather than upon the repose of the heart when it has found its
object and rests upon Him. And so the conception of the true Christian
attitude is that of a continual outgoing of Trust and its child Love; of
Desire and its child Possession; and of Expectation and its child
Fruition towards that unseen Christ. It is much to believe Him, it is
more to believe in Him; it is--I was going to say--most of all to
believe towards Him. For in this region, quite as much as, and I think
more than, in the one to which the saying was originally applied,
'search is better than attainment.' Our condition must always be that of
'forgetting the things that are behind'; and however much we may realise
the union with the unseen Christ in the act of resting upon Him, that
must never be suffered to interfere with the longing for the larger
possession of myself, and fuller consequent likeness to Him, which is
expressed in that great though simple phrase of my text 'believing
towards Him.' Such a continual outgoing of effort, as well as the rest
and blessedness of reposing on Him, is indispensable for all true
gladness. For the intensest activity of our whole being is essential to
the real joy of any part of it, and we shall never know the rapture of
which humanity, even here and now, is capable until we gather our whole
selves, heart, will, and all our practical, as well as our intellectual,
powers in the effort to make more of Christ our own, and to minimise the
distance between us to a mere vanishing point, 'Believing towards whom
ye rejoice.'

That act of trust, however inadequate the object upon which it rests,
and however mistaken may be our conceptions of that on which we lean,
always brings a gladness which is real, until disappointment
di