Now the justifying faith of the conscience-stricken sinner, whose case
St. Paul always has in the foreground of his imagination, means first
of all and most obviously that he consciously takes God at His word as
being ready to forgive his sins, and accept him for Jesus' sake in whom
he believes. It is belief in God as forgiving, or in Jesus as--he does
not stop to inquire how--obtaining and giving him forgiveness. And St.
Paul laid great stress on this simple acceptance of the gift of pardon,
as the gate of the new life and the first act of faith, because the
readiness to be treated as a sinner and merely forgiven in spite 'f our
sins is, as he knew full well in his own case, the final overthrow of
spiritual pride. But this simple 'reliance on the merits of Christ,'
and acceptance of forgiveness at His hands and for His sake, is a
profound movement of the heart--of the spring of human actions--which
involves much more than appears. Luther was hopelessly wrong and
unlike St. Paul when he isolated this mere reliance on another's
merits, and, setting it apart from all {29} deeper movement of will or
love, would have it, and it only, concerned with our justification. To
St. Paul even the first movement of faith is a surrender of
independence, and a recognition in intellect, and much more in will, of
the lordship of Jesus. It is, in other words, a change of allegiance,
and this is the important thing about it. And the absolved man, in
thanking God for his forgiveness, finds himself, as it were, inevitably
and without any fresh act, embarked on a new service. If he does not
find this, he is not a man of faith at all. Faith is so deep a
principle that, though it shows itself first as the mere acceptance of
an undeserved boon from the divine bounty, it involves such hanging
upon God as necessarily enlists the will to choose and serve Him, the
intellect to know and worship Him with a growing perception as He is
revealed in Jesus, and the affections to desire and love Him. The life
of justification thus proceeds 'from faith to faith'--from faith in
Christ 'for us' to faith in Christ 'in us.' The justified man,
accepted into the 'body of Christ' by baptism and made a participator
of the life of Christ, receives the continual gifts of the divine
bounty in their appointed channels, and his faith exercising its
natural {30} faculty of correspondence, absorbs and appropriates the
divine gifts--intellectually, so that the ey