Keeping the Faith

“I have kept the faith.” — 2 TIM. iv. 7.’

THIS was the satisfaction on which Paul’s mind rested when he contemplated the close of his earthly work. It was almost done. The time of his departure was at hand. In this epistle he is almost delegating his mission, with the rich lessons of faith and prudence which it had taught him, to his favorite disciple; and as he looks back over his life, it is interesting to see where his mind rests, and to hear him say with such evident thankfulness and hopefulness, “I have kept the faith.” What do men think of when they come to die? There must be a great difference in the way that different men look back from the margin upon the lives that they have finished, and in the various things on which they dwell with pleasure. The lowest kind of man may merely summon the ghosts of his past pleasures to cheat him with the illusion of a still present reality; may dream of doing over again those things which it was so pleasant once to do, and think what a good time he has had in the world. The man whose life has degenerated into mere routine and habit spends his old age in going over, even without pleasure, the monotonous occupations that have filled his days, and the old captain drills his soldiers, and the old clerk adds up his columns, as they lie upon their dreary death-beds. But higher men think higher things of their past lives. “I have been powerful; I have turned the currents, and made the world different.” That is a great comfort for many a strong man to think of as he dies. “I have been useful; I have made the world better,” is a much nobler satisfaction. “I have been honored I have made men regard and love me,” is a pleasant thought which has made death hai’der and easier at once to many men; others have looked back into rich fields of knowledge through which their path has lain, and said rejoicingly and hopefully, “I have learned much;” while others have had no better comfort to lay to their hearts than merely, “I have made a gret deal of money;” and not a few, weary of life, have laiddown their heads to die with no profounder thought than just that it was over, that at last they had got through.

I think it may be interesting to see something of the position of one who, so different from all of these, looked back over his life and described his success, the aspect of his eventful career which it was most pleasant for him to look at, thus: “I have kept the faith.” There are not a few of our present every-day questions which such a consideration will touch.

What dees St. Paul mean, then, by the faith which he has kept? Is he rejoicing that he has been true to a certain scheme of doctrine, or that he has preserved a certain temper of soul and spiritual relationship to God? For the term “faith” is a very large one. There can be no cbubt, I think, that he means both, and that the latter meaning is a very deep and important one, as we shall see. But this term, “the faith,” did signify for him, beyond all doubt, a certain group of truths, all bound together by their common unity of source and unity of purpose. Paul was too wise and profound not to keep this always in sight. That there must be intellectual conceptions as the base of strong, consistent, and effective feeling is a necessity which he continually recognizes; and the faith which he is thankful to have kept is, first of all, that truth which had been made known to him and to the Church by God. The first thing, then, that strikes us is that when Paul said that he had kept the faith, he evidently believed that there was a faith to keep. At the present day, many scholars of the New Testament, finding very different forms of statement in the epistles of St. Paul from those which fill the four Gospels, and seeming even to find in the epistles some doctrines which do not appear to them to be taught, even by implication, in the words of Christ, have been led to believe that St. Paul made his theology for him self; that with a strong and very original mind he shaped for himself the system of truth which then he taught to his disciples, and which thus has passed into the belief of the Christian Church. We hear much of a Pauline theology. It is a favorite idea. These doctrines are not Christ’s, but Paul’s, stamped with his peculiar character, and enforced only by his personal authority. I cannot but think that this text of ours, the dying utterance of the great apostle, proves very clearly that he had no such idea about his belief and teaching. To him the truth which he believed was not a doctrine which he had discovered, but pthe faith which he had kept. The faith was a body of truth given to him, which he had to hold and to use and to apply, but which, he had not made and was rot to improve. He knew nothing of a

Pauline theology. It was the word of Christ which he preached. It does not prove that there was not such a thing, but it does prove that he knew nothing of it. It existed without his consciousness, if it existed at all. What he meant to do, what he believed that he had done when he died, was not to think out a system which should i-est upon such proof as he could bring, but merely to hold and to transmit a revelation which God had given him. Between these two every religious teacher must choose. There are schools of thought and there are revelations of God. Every teacher must be either a leader in the first or a messenger of the second. St. Paul considered himself, and boasted that he Vas, the latter. His own personality was there. It colored but it did not create, his truth. Its weight pressed the seal of the faith down upon his disciples’ hearts, but the device upon the seal itself was none of his, — was only God’s. This was Paul’s idea of himself and his work, and he certainly was clear sighted, and understood both himself and his work pretty well.

We want, then, to consider the condition of one who, having thus learned and held a positive faith, continues to hold it, — holds it to the end. He keeps the faith. We need not confine our thought to St. Paul. An old man is dying, and as he lets go the things which are trivial and accidental to lay hold of what is essential and important to him, this is what comes to his mind with special satisfaction: “I have kept the faith.” The things that he believed as a boy he has believed all along, in every stage of his growing manhood, and he is believing still. This continuous faith gives a unity to the life that has seen so many changes. All besides is altered, but that is the same. The boy with his round cheek and bright eye, the youth with his quick imagination the young man with his romance of love, the strong mature man who ruled his great business, — you can find nothing of these in the feeble figure that lies be fore you, waiting for the end. He can scarcely recognize himself as having been either of these. But one strong cord of identity runs back, still unbroken, — he is the same believer that he has always been. He has kept the faith.

And this suggests that there may be both bad and good ways in which a man may utter these words of Paul. The bad ways are evident. There is a certain sort of identification with our opinions and beliefs which brings us in time to value them simply because they are ours, not for their own proved truth. And then there is the pride in mere firmness, which is proud of having held the same ground for a great many years, and refuses to desert it, not because the ground is good, but because the man is too obstinate to change. Pride and obstinacy! Where is the faithfulness to a good cause which the world has rightly honored, that has not had some lurking mixture of these subtle counterfeits? The very martyr at the stake must surely sometimes have known that nothing but the fire of his martyrdom could finally purge him perfectly of these, and leave only the good elements of persistent faith, which are devotion to the truth for its own essential value and a graduallyacquired thankfulness for the good that the truth in our long loyalty to it has done for us. It is these that make the persistency of belief reasonable and pure. It is the second of these — the gradual sense of what the truth we hold has done for us, the relation which the absolute truth has acquired to our personal experience — that makes our hold upon it stronger and tighter the longer that we hold it, the older that we grow.

For I think that the first condition of any permanent hold on any truth is this, that the truth itself should be live enough and large enough to open constantly and bring to every new condition through which we pass some new experience of itself. The truth that is narrow and partial we outgrow; only the truth that is broad and complete grows up with us and can be kept. The one is like the clothes of childhood that are cast aside; the other is like the live body that grows up with the growing soul and at each stage offers it a fit instrument for its work and a fit jjiedium through which to receive its education. You must teach your children truth in part, but the partial truth you teach them must be true and so have in it the essential completeness of all truth, or else they will outgrow it and cast it off as hundreds of growing children do leave behind the whole well-meant but narrowly-conceived religion of their nurseries, as they pass out of the nursery-door into the world.

The true faith which a man has kept up to the end of his life must be one that has opened with his growth and constantly won new reality and color from his changing experience. The old man does believe what the child believed; but how different it is, though still the same. It is the field that once held the seed, now waving and rustling under the autumn wind with the harvest that it holds, yet all the time it has kept the corn. The joy of his life has richened his belief. His sorrow has deepened it. His doubts have sobered it. His enthusiasms have fired it. His labor has purified it. This is the work that life does upon faith. This is the beauty of an old man’s religion. His doctrines are like the house that he has lived in, rich with associations which make it certain that he will never move out of it. His doctrines have been illustrated and strengthened and endeared by the good help they have given to his life. And no doctrine that has not done this can be really held up to the end with any such vital grasp as will enable us to carry it with us through the river and enter with it into the new life beyond.

And again, is it not true that any belief which we really keep up to the end of life must at some time have become for us a personal conviction, resting upon evidence of its own? We get all our notions and especially our religious notions, at first, by mere tradition. Some body tells us that this is true, and because we have no evidence that it is not, and because we know of nothing else to believe, we believe what we are told. But by and by the age of pure tradition passes. The capacity for evidence arrives; and what I claim is, that the man who does not win some personal conviction of the truth of what he holds cannot be truly said to hold it. He may still range himself under the banner of the belief that he was taught. When men ask him he may say, “That is my religion;” but if, when he is asked why lie believes it, he can give no better answer than merely “I was taught so,” he is not a real, he certainly is not a reliable, holder of the truth. The evidence may be of various kinds, external or internal, of argument or of experience. I do not say that every Christian must study books, but by some personal witness addressed to that faculty which is the receptive faculty in him, — the intellect, the conscience, or the heart, — the truth must come with conviction or it never really is his truth. There is a time when the nature comes of age with reference to this whole matter of belief. If there be exceptions, if there be those who must live in the region of tradition all their days, they are to reasonable men what imbeciles and idiots, whom the law keeps all their lives in a condition of childhood and wardship, are to the young men whom it compels at a right age to take the responsibility of their own lives.

All this, of course, has nothing to do with St. Paul, because his faith, from the first, rested upon its own evidence. It did not come to him in childhood from other men, but in the full strength of his reasonable manhood straight from Christ Himself. He never passed through that middle region where tradition and conviction mix. His Christian life was like the natural life of Adam, born mature, without a childhood; and so to some extent the lives of all the Apostles and early Christians must have been. But now almost every life must pass through that middle country, and many find it very boisterous and dark. It is the land where doubt hangs thick; the time between the moonlight and the sunlight, which is the bleakest of the day. When I see what to some people seems so inconsistent, a man whose whole heart is clinging to a religion at which the head is sorely puzzled, who loves intensely what he yet cannot say that he believes, I think I see one whom God is leading through this foggy middle land. His love will help him to the evidence and meanwhile will hold him from falling till the evidence grows clear. Men, believers and unbelievers, from their different points of view, distrust one who is in just this state, ask how he can love a truth which he cannot say that he believes is true, but after all this familiar experience, this condition in which some certainly are to whom I speak to-day, verifies the words of the old Church Father, which have always been felt to be true, that “human things must be known in order to be loved, while divine things, on the other hand, must be loved in order to be known.”

I know, indeed, how much a merely traditional religion will inspire men to do. I know that for a faith which is not really theirs, but only what they call it, “their fathers’ faith,” men will dispute and argue, make friendships and break them, contribute money, undertake great labors, change the whole outward tenor of their life. I know that men will suffer for it. I am not sure but they will die to uphold a creed to which they were born, and with which their own character for firmness and consistency has become involved. All this a traditional faith can do. It can do every thing except one, and that it can never do. It can never feed a spirit ual life and build a man up in holiness and grace. Be fore it can do that our fathers’ faith must first by strong personal conviction become ours.

It is this feeling of the supreme importance of personal conviction which has led to a good many strange ideas about the religious education of children. You have heard people say, perhaps some of you have thought yourselves, that it was not right to give children any positive religious teaching; that you must not put into their minds what you hold to be the truth, but leave them by and by to gather for themselves the convictions which should come to them when they are capable of being convinced. It is certainly very much like saying that you ought not to feed a child gratuitously in his earliest years, because the time will come when he will have to earn his own living and to feed himself. You feed him as a child just that you may bring him on, and make him ready by and by to feed himself. After that, to keep on feeding him would do him harm. And so you teach a child religious truth, using his faculty of trust in authority, only just in order that by and by he may search for himself and re ceive conviction of what is true. After that, to teach him to believe things on your word would do him harm. Any other way is blind and disloyal to the facts of life. Life is one in many, a unity in manifold diversity. The great purpose of life — the shaping of character by truth — is to be sought in all the life. There are no wasted hours. It must begin in the life’s morning and run on till the nightfall comes. With the first opening of conscious existence, — nay, who can say how long before existence be comes conscious, — this process, the shaping of character by truth, begins. In each period of the changing life it may change its methods and yet be the same process still. In the early life the channel through which truth enters for its work is obedient trust. Later it is individual conviction; but he mangles the life, and loses its symmetry and unity, who breaks off either half or dishonors either channel; who either thinks there can be no religion till the mind can understand its grounds, or tries to keep the mature mind under the power of traditional ideas of which it has received no personal conviction.

And here I think that, rightly seen, the culture of our Church asserts its wisdom. The Church has in herself the very doctrine of tradition. She teaches the child a faith that has the warrant of the ages, full of devotion and of love. She calls on him to believe doctrines of which he cannot be convinced as yet. The tradition, the hereditation of belief, the unity of the human history, are ideas very familiar to her, of which she constantly and beautifully makes use. And yet she does not disown her work of teaching and arguing and convincing. She can not, and yet be true to her mission. She teaches the young with the voice of authority; she addresses the mature with the voice of reason. Let her give up the first function, and her assemblies would turn into mere societies of debate. Let her abandon the second, and they must be blighted with some doctrine of infallibility. Her baptism receives a child into the traditionary culture, and her commemorative Supper is an expression of the adult believer’s personal conviction of the faith of Christ. With such completeness, such constant sense of its unity, does the true Christian Church deal with the human life that her Master gives into her care.

And there is still another feeling, which goes even farther than this desire to exclude children from positive religious teaching. Some people seem to think that it is bad for any man to have definitely accepted a religious belief in which he proposes to live and die, which he never expects to change. It is the loose popular feeling against creeds. “Have your creeds,” says, in substance, one of our teachers, “if you must, but build them like birds’ nests, to be used only this year.” Such a feeling would make it disreputable for any man to say, more than one year hence, “I have kept the faith.” To say it at the close of a lifetime, for all the life, would prove the man to be either insincere or blindly stupid, It is the violent protest against the deadness of traditional religion which would substitute for it the galvanic life of ever-altering whim. Surely there is something at least as blind in insisting upon change as in insisting upon permanence. Surely such a teaching utterly unfits the mind for the noble search after an absolute truth, making it believe either that there is no such thing or else that it is unattainable by man. Surely it must reject the whole idea of a revelation from God to man. Surely it must break away the solid ground on which alone men can stand to do their work for God or fellow-man. For, feel as we may how blindly men have often chosen their beliefs, and how ignorantly they have clung to them, still we must see that only from the strong footing of some truth which they believed, and deemed unchangeable, only from the solid ground of some clear creed, have men done good strong work in the world. Strong action can issue only from strong faith. Only out of certainty comes power. I do not think that men consi ier how much of all that is dearest to them about God and themselves and fellow-man they must abandon, unless they can believe that it is possible and profitable to come with the best light they have to some conclusion which shall be certainty to them, and then to count that settled; to keep that faith; not to be forever pulling up and examining that root-power of their lives, but, with the best cultivation they can give it, to make it blossom into every grace, and ripen into every fruit of good activity which it is capable of bearing.

It is not hard, perhaps, to see whence comes the feeling that we speak of. It seems to me to be aiming at this, which men are always in danger of forgetting, that any truth large enough for one to hold for a lifetime must have newer and richer sides to show the fuller-grown nature than it could open to the novice who laid hold on it at first. He is, indeed, unwise, and almost certainly condemns himself to stunted growth, who says that every truth shall always seem to him in the future just as it has seemed to him in the past. If he changes, his relations to the most external truths must alter. If he grows, the revelations of God must seem to him greater, seen from a higher stand-point. This is the only true conservatism. Who is he that keeps most truly the principles of the fathers of our national government, but he who is forever on the watch to see in what new and unexpected way those principles must be applied to the full-grown republic which, if our fathers saw at all, they saw very far off? One who thoroughly holds the great truth of the Trinity would be sorry to think that he should ever cease to hold that sacred truth, but he would be sorry, too, to think that he would always hold it just as he holds it now, and that he never would see more deeply into its infinite meaning. He who holds the truth of the Atonement is sure that he will always hold it, but it will not always be as barren to him as now it sometimes seems. Some day, if he is better and more spiritual, its holy mystery will be to him, not less mysterious, but infinitely fuller of spiritual grace and strength than it is to-day. This is an expectation which does much for us. It lets progress into our lives and yet does not destroy their continuity. It repeats in our mental and spiritual natures what is so beautiful in our bodies, — the harmony of constant growth with unimpaired identity.

And this is an expectation which no mere line of death, no dark shadow of the grave, can limit. The “knowing in part” which belongs to this world passes on and is one with the “knowing even as also we are known” which is to come to us as we stand for an ageless eternity before the throne of God. Heaven is not to sweep our truths away, but only to turn them till we see their glory, to open them till we see their truth, and to unveil our eyes till for the first time we shall really see them. You teach your little child some simplest truth about the Saviour. And the child dies and goes to heaven, and knowledge comes into the glorified mind in unknown ways. God is its teacher. Love is its education. Unguessed works for the Father’s glory develop and enrich it. It sees Christ and learns more and mwe-ot Him to all eternity, and yet to all eternity your child, looking back over the richness of the knowledge that has come, sees that it all is one with that first truth learned at your knee, and sums up all eternity in this one confession, this one tribute of thank fulness to God, — “I have kept the faith.”

And now have we not reached some idea of the kind of faith which it is possible for a man to keep? What sort of a creed may one hold and expect to hold it always, live in it, die in it, and carry it even to the life beyond? In the first place, it must be a creed broad enough to allow the man to grow within it, to contain and to supply his ever-developing mind and character. It will not be a creed burdened with many details. It will consist of large truths and principles, capable of ever- varying applications to ever-varying life. So only can it be clear, strong, positive, and yet leave the soul free to grow within it, nay, feed the soul richly and minister to its growth. The men of narrowest ideas are the most changeable or the most obstinate of men. If their minds are active, they are changeable, always shifting one narrow position for an other. If their minds are sluggish, they are obstinate, doggedly clinging to the splinter of truth on which they have been wrecked. But the true Christian believer says, with David, “Thou hast set my feet in a large room;” and in the large truth where his Lord has put him, he abides, finding abundant space to live his life and grow his growth.

And the second characteristic of the faith that can be kept will be its evidence, its proved truth. It will not be a mere aggregation of chance opinions. The reason why a great many people seem to be always changing their faith is that they never really have any faith. They have indeed what they call a faith, and are often very positive about it. They have gathered together a number of opinions and fancies, often very ill-considered, which they say that they believe, using the deep and sacred word for a very superficial and frivolous action of their wills. They no more have a faith than the city vagrant has a home who sleeps upon a different door step every night. And yet he does sleep somewhere every night; and so these wanderers among the creeds at each given moment are believing something, although that something is forever altering. We do not properly believe what we only think. A thousand speculations come into our heads, and our minds dwell upon them, which are not to be therefore put into our creed, however plausible they seem. Our creed, our credo, any thing which we call by such a sacred name, is not what we have thought, but what our Lord has told us. The true creed must come down from above and not out from within. Have your opinions always, but do not bind yourself to them. Call your opinions your creed, and you will change it every week. Make your creed simply and broadly out of the revelation of God, and you may keep it to the end. This is the difference between the hundreds of long, detailed confessions of many differing sects, overloaded with the minute speculations of good men, which take in and dismiss their believers like the nightly lodgers of an eastern caravansary, and the short scriptural creed of the church universal, into which souls come seeking rest and strength, and live in it as in a home, and go no more out forever.

And then the third quality of a creed that a man may keep up to the end is that it is a creed capable of being turned into action. A mere speculation, however true it be, I think you never can be sure that the mind will hold. The faith which you keep must be a faith that demands obedience, and you can keep it only by obeying it. Are not both of these true? Those parts of religion which are purely speculative, if indeed such mere speculation is part of religion at all, are the parts in which men most often and most easily change. A hundred men change their views of abstract truth for one who alters his conviction of practical duty. The one may be changed and nothing suffers; a change in the other alters the whole life.

Look at two men holding the same truth, — the truth of the Trinity, for instance. To one it presents itself always as a doctrine to be learned, to the other as a law to be obeyed. One’s view of it is always theoretical, the other’s always practical. They both believe it, but one asserts it, demonstrates it, reasons about it. The other lives by it. Which is the true believer? I can conceive of the first man losing his belief and yet going on much the same. Convince him with a specious argument and he will let it drop, and, except that he talks of it no longer, nobody will know the difference. But take the truth of the Divine Father, the Divine Saviour, the Divine Comforter, out of the other’s life, and all is gone. Duty no longer has a zest, nor prayer an object, nor grief a consolation. The whole life falls to pieces when its truth is gone. Is not this last the man who will keep the faith? Practical obedience is the “deepness of earth” of the Lord’s parable in which the sower’s seed is caught and rooted, and held fast, and saved from the fowls of the wayside and the scorching sun of the stony places.

Breadth, Positive Evidence, Practicalness, — these, then, must be the characteristics of the creed which a man expects to live in and die in.

I have spoken, in illustration of what I have been saying, about the truth of the Trinity. Do you remember the Collect which our Church has appointed for Trinity Sunday? It bears upon our subject. “Almighty and Everlasting God,” it prays, “who hast given unto us Thy servants grace, by the confession of a true faith, to acknowledge the glory of the eternal Trinity, and in the power of the divine Majesty to worship the Unity; we beseech Thee that Thou wouldest keep us steadfast in this faith, and evermore defend us from all adversities, who livest and reignest, one God, world without end. Amen.” Now what does that Collect pray for with its solemn and sonorous words? Does it simply ask God to make us obstinate and firm? Does it implore Him to keep away from our feeble reasons any strong arguments that might c-onvince us that the doctrine of the Trinity is not true? Is it the cry of cowardice, or of self-indulgent indolence that dreads to be disturbed? I think our study must have taught us something more than this. He who prays for an end prays for the necessary means. He who prays for the preservation of his faith in the Trinity prays that his faith in the Trinity may be such that it can be preserved. Then comes in all that we have said. He prays that his faith in the Trinity may be broad, not full of minute definitions of the method of the divine existence, which are impertinent and irreverent, and may prove untenable, but simply resting on the great fact of the divinity of Father, Son, and Spirit, which shall grow clearer and richer to-him”as he grows stronger under it. He prays that his Faith in the Trinity may have positive evidence, that it may rest on God’s Word and not on his own opinion, and so again that all mere theories about it, which are only his own opinion, may be separated from the substance of his faith. He prays that his faith in the Trinity may be practical, continually making him strong and active in the manifold live duties that fill all his life. He prays for largeness of thought, for honesty and thoroughness of purpose, for earnestness of work, when he prays that God will keep him steadfast in the faith of the eternal Trinity. It is surely a prayer for man to pray and for God to hear.

Or take the constant exhortations that are made to people from the Christian pulpits to hold fast their faith. What do they mean? Are they mere pleas for obstinacy? Do they beg the people to close their ears to argument, to keep out of the way of light, to dread and run away from the honest man who comes to meet them with a faith different from theirs, for fear that they should be converted and lose the faith of their fathers? Are thousands of ministers preaching doctrinal discourses this Sunday morning, — Romanist, Baptist, Methodist, Unitarian, Episcopalian, — each preaching to his own congregation and begging them at all hazards to hold fast their faith, each busy building the fences of his sheep-fold a little higher and warning his flock of the danger of looking over? That were pitiful enough. I would, indeed, that ministers and people both understood what kind of faith alone it is that can be kept. He who exhorts to an end exhorts to the necessary means. He who exhorts men to keep their faith exhorts them to make their faith broad, solid, practical, so that it can be kept. Of that exhortation there cannot be too much. Let all ministers utter that exhortation and all people hear it, and speedily the “Holy Catholic Church, the Communion of Saints,” which we believe in, must be seen grandly issuing from this tumult of conflicting sects as out of a multitude of narrow, shallow, brawling mountain-streams issues by and by the broad, deep, and effective river. This is what we really preach, or ought to. This is what I preach to you to-day. Not, “Be obstinate, be quarrelsome, be fighters for your faith,” but, “Be wide, be thorough, be workers in your faith, and so keep it to the end.”

How clear it is, then, that St. Paul’s words may mean very differently in the mouths of different men. When you find a man of eighty professing to believe still what he believed at twenty, it may signify something very bad or very good. It may mean death or life. It may mean that long ago he gave up thinking and studying and feeling, and is going along through life, and by and by is going out of life, to God, with nothing but an old withered handful of grass and flowers, dead long since, which he still thinks precious, because they were fresh and live when he picked them sixty yeai-s ago. But he has held them in his hands instead of planting them into his life, and they are dead. He goes, saying, “I have kept the faith;” but he has no more kept it than the tomb that keeps the body keeps the man. But there is another old man who believes still his boyhood’s creed. The things that were so dear to him at first have grown dearer, year by year. The joy and grief of life, like sun shine and rain, have worked together to ripen the well planted field. He said the creed this morning, and it was truer to him than on JJte day when he was confirmed. All life has illusti’ated it, and now as death draws near he sees how through death’s window eternity casts into it light and meaning that it never had before. He will go, saying, “I have kept the faith,” and hold it up really still green and vigorous before God; and as God takes it and plants it in the richer soil of the eternal life His words of benediction will descend, “Well done, good and faithful servant; thou hast been faithful in these few things, enter into my joy, and keep thy faith there still forever.” Such be our constant saying of our creed, our steadfast keeping of the faith.

I said, when I began, that this meaning of the term, the faith, which made it signify a certain scheme of doctrine, was only a part of the meaning of St. Paul. I meant to speak of the other meaning, which I am not sure was not more prominent in his mind, the personal loyalty to Christ which had been the joy and law and inspiration of his life. But I have dwelt so long upon the first meaning that I have left no time for the other. I can only suggest it to you, and I ought not to omit it altogether. When Paul the aged said, “I have kept the faith,” he was remembering how, from the time his Mas ter called him, he had served that Master all his days. As he wrote it he must have seen Damascus and the open sky again. The voice of Jesus must have been once more in his ears. From that time on he had served and loved his Lord. “What wilt Thou have me to do?” had been the question of all his life.

His faith in Christ he had kept only by obedience to Christ. If it is impossible, as we have said, to keep a conviction, still more is it impossible to keep a feeling, a personal devotion, without setting it into action. You can keep a faith only as you keep a plant, by rooting it into your life and making it grow there. So it undergoes the changes that belong to growth and yet continues still the same. But this meaning of our text I can only point out to-day, and at some other time we may deal with it more fully.

It was a noble end certainly. Men lose their love and trust and hope, as they grow old. Here was a man who kept them all fresh to the last. Men cease to have strong convictions, and grow cynical or careless. Here was a man who believed more, and not less, as he knew more of God, and of himself, and of the world. His old age did not come creeping into port, a wreck, with broken masts arid rudder gone, but full-sailed still, and strong for other voyages in other seas. We are sure that his was the old age God loves to see; that the careless and the hopeless and the faithless are the failures. To such men as Paul alone is God’s promise to David fulfilled: “With long life will I satisfy him and show him my salvation.”