Entered according to the Act of Congress, in the year 1849, by GEORGE B. CHEEVER, D.D., In the Clerk's Office of the District Court for the Southern District of New York. R. CRAIGHEAD, PRINTER, 112 FULTON STREET, NEW YORK. T. B. SMITH, STEREOTYPER, 216 WILLIAM STREET. 1-22-35 PREFACE. In this humble attempt to unite the speculative and the practical on the subject of Faith, I have followed no theory, but have endeavored to trace the stream of Christian experience, as it is recorded in the Word of God, and makes its appearance in the hearts of God's people. But we begin the stream back of its appearance as a River of Life, even there, where belief exists, as a constitutional element of our being, though not as faith in God manifest in the flesh. Men cannot live even in and for the body only, without a belief in something above the body, and out of it. We take away the very ground under the feet of infidelity, by showing that the unbeliever, even in not believing, has to throw himself upon belief, and has to be a more credulous soul by far, than the man of spiritual Faith. But as Thomas Carlyle somewhere excellently says (or something very like it), the credulity of unbelief is a faith in mere inert dead masses, with a blank denial or blind ignorance of that spiritual lightning, which alone can set things on fire. And a woful, dead, hopeless age it is, when the belief in spiritual lightning has gone, and there is nothing deemed real but the five senses. The union of Grace and Truth is only in Jesus Christ; and Faith is the manifestation, not of human power, but of Christ himself in the mind, Christ in the heart, Christ in the life, and Christ in the soul, the hope of glory. Faith is a life, not a speculation; it is a life, and not a mere emotion in regard to the Author of life. I have endeavored to trace its workings, its forms, its results, its various developments, for the ministry of the life of a practical piety, in Christians who, like Paul, count not themselves to have attained, but would be pressing forward. May the Divine blessing accompany the effort! 665536 CONTENTS. Beginnings of the River.-Poverty of truth without life.-Grace and truth combined only in Christ.-Mistakes of mere head-work without PAGE Coloring of Truth through the prism of individual experience.-Grace a winding River, and a free, original, unconstrained life.-Danger of making press-gangs out of human theories and hypotheses.—The law within and the law without.-Light within and light without.- Heart-light and intellectual light, and God's prerogative in regard Faith here, a discipline preparatory to knowledge and faith here- after.-Passage of faith into knowledge and life.-Faith in the testi- mony of God becoming experience.-The life of heaven a life of faith. The extreme credulity of unbelief.-Necessity of faith in evil as well as good.-Impossibility of escaping from the evil, except by Faith followed by the Earnest of the Spirit.-The distinction between Faith, Knowledge, and Experience. Neither Faith nor Experience possible, if Experience be demanded first.-Reproductive power of Faith, and its reduplicating processes of growth.-Connexion between the Earnest of the Spirit in the Church, and the conversion of souls Effect of unbelief upon the Character.-Illustrations of unbelief in the Pharisees and Sadducees.-Absolute necessity of relying on God's testimony.-Purpose for which that testimony was given, that by faith we may avoid the experience of evil, and secure the experience of good.—Comparison of the experiment of faith, and the experi- ment of experience.-Faith alone can lead the soul to heaven; Sympathy with God and sympathy with man.-Faith in God's Word, faith in God's holiness and justice, and faith in man's guilt, the elements of power in leading the Soul to faith in Christ the Saviour.— Comparison of Edwards and Whitefield.-Comparison of revivals of religion as produced mainly by true sympathy with God, and a regard to his glory, or mainly by sympathy with man and the desire The Schoolmaster and the Father.-The Servant and the Child.-Faith produced by the combustion of God's promises with man's sins. |