A History of the Reformation Volume I Part 25

"It is a living, busy, active, powerful thing, faith; it is impossible for it not to do us good continually. It never asks whether good works are to be done; it has done them before there is time to ask the question, and it is always doing them."(394)

Christianity is therefore an interwoven tissue of promises and prayers of faith. On the one side there is the Father, revealing Himself, sending down to us His promises which are yea and amen in Christ Jesus; and on the other side there are the hearts of men ascending in faith to G.o.d, receiving, accepting, and resting on the promises of G.o.d, and on G.o.d who always gives Himself in His promises.

This is what came to Luther and ended his long and terrible struggle. He is unwearied in describing it. The descriptions are very varied, so far as external form and expression go,-now texts from the Psalms, the Prophets, or the New Testament most aptly quoted; now phrases borrowed from the picturesque language of the mediaeval mystics; now sentences of striking, even rugged, originality; sometimes propositions taken from the mediaeval scholastic. But whatever the words, the meaning is always the same.

This conception of what is meant by Christianity is the religious soul of the Reformation. It contains within it all the distinctively religious principles which inspired it. It can scarcely be called a dogma. It is an experience, and the phrases which set it forth are the descriptions of an experience which a human soul has gone through. The thing itself is beyond exact definition-as all deep experiences are. It must be felt and gone through to be known. The Reformation started from this personal experience of the believing Christian, which it declared to be the one elemental fact in Christianity which could never be proved by argument and could never be dissolved away by speculation. It proclaimed the great truth, which had been universally neglected throughout the whole period of mediaeval theology by everyone except the Mystics, that in order to know G.o.d man must be in living touch with G.o.d Himself. Therein lay its originality and its power. Luther rediscovered religion when he declared that the truly Christian man must cling directly and with a living faith to the G.o.d Who speaks to him in Christ, saying, "I am thy salvation." The earlier Reformers never forgot this. Luther proclaimed his discovery, he never attempted to prove it by argument; it was something self-evident-seen and known when experienced.

This is always the way with great religious pioneers and leaders. They have all had the prophetic gift of spiritual vision, and the magnetic speech to proclaim what they have seen, felt, and known. They have all had, in a far-off way, the insight and manner of Jesus.

When our Lord appeared among men claiming to be more than a wise man or a prophet, declaring that He was the Messiah, the Son of Man and the Son of G.o.d, when He announced that all men had need of Him, and that He alone could save and redeem, He set forth His claims in a manner unique among founders of religions. He made them calmly and as a matter of course. He never explained elaborately why He a.s.sumed the t.i.tles He took. He never reasoned about His position as the only Saviour. He simply announced it, letting the conviction of the truth steal almost insensibly into the minds and hearts of His followers as they saw His deeds and heard His words. He a.s.sumed that they must interpret His death in one way only. This was always His manner. It was not His way to explain mysteries our curiosity would fain penetrate. He quietly took for granted many things we would like to argue about. His sayings came from One who lived in perpetual communion with the Unseen Father, and He uttered them quietly and a.s.suredly, confident that they carried with them their own self-evidencing power.

So it was with St. Paul. His letters and sermons are full of arguments, no doubt, full of pleadings and persuasion, but they all start from and rest upon his vision of the living, risen Saviour. His last word is always, "When it pleased G.o.d to reveal His Son in me"; that was the elemental fact which he proclaimed and which summed up everything, the personal experience from which he started on his career as an apostle. The place of Athanasius as a great religious leader has been obscured by his position as a theologian; but when we turn to his writings, where do we find less of what is commonly called dogmatic theology? There is argument, reasoning, searching for proofs and their statement; but all that belongs to the outworks in his teaching. The central citadel is a spiritual intuition-I _know_ that _my_ Saviour is the G.o.d Who made heaven and earth.

He took his stand firmly and unflinchingly on that personal experience, and all else mattered little compared with the fundamental spiritual fact.

It was not his arguments, but his unflinching faith that convinced his generation.

So it was with Augustine, Bernard,(395) Francis-so it has been with every great religious leader of the Christian people. His strength, whether of knowledge, or conviction, or sympathy,-his driving power, if the phrase may be used,-has always come from direct communion with the unseen, and rests upon the fact, felt and known by himself and communicated to others by a mysterious sympathy, that it has pleased G.o.d to reveal Christ in him in some way or other.

So it was with Luther and the Reformation in which he was the leader. Its driving power was a great religious experience, old, for it has come to the people of G.o.d in all generations, and yet new and fresh as it is the nature of all such experiences to be. He _knew_ that his life was hid with Christ in G.o.d in spite of all evil, in spite of sin and sense of guilt.

His old dread of G.o.d had vanished, and instead of it there had arisen in his heart a love to G.o.d in answer to the love which came from the vision of the Father revealing Himself. He had experienced this, and he had proclaimed what he had gone through; and the experience and its proclamation were the foundation on which the Reformation was built. Its beginnings were not doctrinal but experimental.

Doctrines, indeed, are not the beginnings of things; they are, at the best, storehouses of past and blessed experiences. This is true of most knowledge in all departments of research. We may recognise that there is some practical use in the rules of logic, ancient and modern, but we know that they are but the uncouth and inadequate symbols of the ways in which an indefinable mental tact, whose delicacy varies with the mind that uses it, perceives divergences and affinities, and weaves its web of knowledge in ways that are past finding out. We know that logical argument is a good s.h.i.+eld but a bad sword, and that while syllogisms may silence, they seldom convince; that persuasion arises from a subtle sympathy of soul with soul, which is as indefinable as the personalities which exhale it. There is always at the basis of knowledge of men and things this delicate contact of personality with personality, whether we think of the gathering, or a.s.sorting, or exchanging the wisdom we possess. If this be true of our knowledge of common things, it is overwhelmingly so of all knowledge of G.o.d and of things divine. We must be in touch with G.o.d to know Him in the true sense of knowledge. At the basis of every real advance in religion there must be an intimate vision of G.o.d impressed upon us as a religious experience which we know to be true because we have felt it; and what one has, another receives by a species of spiritual contagion. The revival under Francis of a.s.sisi spread as it did because the fire flaming in the heart of the preacher was also kindled in the hearts of his hearers.

Luther headed a Reformation because men felt and knew that he had, as he said, found a gracious G.o.d by trusting in the grace of G.o.d revealed to him in Christ Jesus. It was not the Augsburg Confession that made the Reformation; it was the expansion of that religious experience which finds very inadequate description in that or in any other statement of doctrines.

-- 2. The universal Priesthood of Believers.

Luther's religious experience, that he, a sinner, received forgiveness by simply throwing himself on G.o.d revealed in Christ Jesus the Saviour, came to him as an astounding revelation which was almost too great to be put into words. He tried to express it in varying ways, all of which he felt too utterly inadequate to describe it. We can see how he laboured at it from 1512 to 1517. It lay hidden in his discourse to the a.s.sembly of clergy in the episcopal palace at Ziesar (June 5th, 1512), when he declared that all reform must begin in the hearts of individual men. We can see it growing more and more articulate in his annotations, notes, and heads of lectures on the Psalms, delivered in the years 1513-1516, struggling to free itself from the phrases of the Scholastic Theology which could not really express it. His private letters, in which he was less hampered by the phraseology which he still believed appropriate to theology, are full of happier expressions.(396) _Justificatio_ is _vivificatio_, and means to redeem from sins without any merit in the person redeemed; it takes place when sin is not imputed, but the penitents are reputed righteous. Grace is the pity (_misericordia_) of G.o.d; it manifests itself in the remission of sins; it is the truth of G.o.d seen in the fulfilment of His promises in the historical work of Christ; Jesus Christ Himself is grace, is the way, is life and salvation. Faith is trust in the truth of G.o.d as manifested in the life and work of Jesus Christ; it is to believe in G.o.d; it is a knowledge of the Cross of Christ; it is to understand that the Son of G.o.d became incarnate, was crucified, and raised again for our salvation. The three central thoughts-_justification_, _grace_, _faith_-expressed in these inadequate phrases, are always looked upon and used to regulate that estimate of ourselves which forms the basis of piety. It is needless to trace the growing adequacy of the description.

Luther at last found words to say that the central thought in Christianity is that the believer in possession of faith, which is itself the gift of G.o.d, is able to throw himself on G.o.d in Christ Who is his salvation and Who has mirrored Himself for us in Christ Jesus. He had trod the weary round that Augustine had gone before him; he had tried _to help himself_ in every possible way; he had found that with all his striving he could do nothing. Then, strange and mysterious as it was, the discovery had not brought despair, but rejoicing and comfort; for since there was no help whatever in man, his soul had been forced to find _all_-not part, but all-help in G.o.d. When he was able to express his experience he could say that the faith which throws itself on G.o.d, which is G.o.d's own gift, is the certainty of the forgiveness of sins. It was no adherence to doctrines more or less clearly comprehended; it was no act of initiation to be followed by a nearer approach to G.o.d and a larger measure of His grace; it was the power which gives life, certainty, peace, continuous self-surrender to G.o.d as the Father, and which transforms and renews the whole man. It was the life of the soul; it was Christianity within the believer-as Jesus Christ and His work is Christianity outside the believer.

It is manifest that as soon as this experience attained articulate statement, it was bound to discredit much that was in mediaeval theology and religious usage. Yet the striking thing about Luther was that he never sought to employ it in this way until one great abuse forced itself upon him and compelled him to test it by this touchstone of what true Christianity was. This reserve not only shows that there was nothing revolutionary in the character of Luther, nothing romantic or quixotic, it also manifests the quiet greatness of the man. Nor was there anything in the fundamental religious experience of Luther which necessarily conflicted with the contents of the old ecclesiastical doctrines, or even with the common usages of the religious life. There was a change in the att.i.tude towards both, and an entirely new estimate of their religious value, but nothing which called for their immediate criticism, still less for their destruction. Faith, which was the Christian life, could no longer be based upon them; they were not the essential things that they had been supposed to be; but they might have their uses if kept in their proper places-aids to all holy living, but not that from which the life sprang. The thought that the entire sum of religion consists in "unwavering trust of the heart in Him Who has given Himself to us in Christ as our Father, personal a.s.surance of faith, because Christ with His work undertakes our cause," simplified religion marvellously, and made many things which had been regarded as essential mere outside auxiliaries.

But it did not necessarily sweep them away. Though the acceptance of certain forms of doctrine, auricular confession, the monastic life, communion by the laity in one "kind" only in the Sacrament of the Supper, a celibate priesthood, fasting, going on pilgrimages, not to eat meat on Friday, had nothing to do with the essentials of the Christian life; still it was not necessary to insist on eating meat on Friday, on abstaining from fasting, and so on. The great matter was the spirit in which such things were performed or left undone. What the fundamental religious experience had done was to show the liberty of the Christian man to trust courageously in G.o.d and count all things of little moment compared with this which was the one thing needful.

"Out of a complex system of expiations, good deeds, and comfortings, of strict statutes and uncertain apportionments of grace, out of magic and blind obedience, Luther led religion forth and gave it a strenuously concentrated form. The Christian religion is the living a.s.surance of the living G.o.d Who has revealed Himself and opened His heart in Christ-nothing more."(397)

It was a vital part of this fundamental experience that the living G.o.d Who had manifested Himself in Christ was accessible to every Christian. To quote Harnack again:

"Rising above all anxieties and terrors, above all ascetic devices, above all directions of theology, above all interventions of hierarchy and Sacraments, Luther ventured to lay hold of G.o.d Himself in Christ, and in this act of faith, which he recognised as G.o.d's work, his whole being obtained stability and firmness, nay, even a personal joy and certainty, which no mediaeval Christian had ever possessed."(398)

G.o.d Himself gave the believer the power to throw himself directly on G.o.d.

But this contradicted one of the most widely diffused and most strongly held religious beliefs of the mediaeval Church, and was bound to come in collision with it whenever the two were confronted with each other. It was the universal conception of mediaeval piety that the mediation of a priest was essential to salvation. Mediaeval Christians believed with more or less distinctness that the supernatural life of the soul was _created_, nourished, and perfected through the sacraments, and that the priests administering them possessed, in virtue of their ordination, miraculous powers whereby they daily offered the true sacrifice of Jesus Christ upon the altar, forgave the sins of men, and taught the truths of salvation with divine authority. It was this universally accepted power of a mediatorial priesthood which had enslaved Europe, and which had rendered the liberty of a Christian man an impossible thing. Everywhere the priesthood barred, or was supposed to be able to bar, the way to G.o.d. The Church, which ought to have shown how G.o.d Who had revealed Himself in Christ was accessible to every believer, had surrounded the inner shrine of the sanctuary of His Presence with a triple wall of defence which prevented entrance. When man or woman felt sorrow for sin, they were instructed to go, not to G.o.d, but to a man, often of immoral life, and confess their sins to him because he was a priest. When they wished to hear the comforting words of pardon spoken, it was not from G.o.d, but from a priest that the a.s.surance was supposed to come. G.o.d's grace, to help to holy living and to bring comfort in dying, was given, it was said, only through a series of sacraments which fenced man's life round, and priests could give or withhold these sacraments. Man was born again in baptism; he came of age spiritually in confirmation; his marriage was cleansed from the sin of l.u.s.t in the sacrament of matrimony; penance brought back his spiritual life slain by deadly sin; the Eucharist gave him with his voyage victual as he journeyed through life; and deathbed grace was imparted in extreme unction. These ceremonies were not the signs and promises of the free grace of G.o.d, under whose wide canopy, as under that of heaven, man lived his spiritual life. They were jealously guarded doors from out of which grudgingly, and commonly not without fees, the priests dispensed the free grace of G.o.d.

During the later Middle Ages a gross abuse made the evils of this conception of a mediating priesthood emphatic. The practical evil lying in the whole thought was not so very apparent when the matter was regarded from the side of giving out the grace of G.o.d; but when it came to withholding it, then it was seen what the whole conception meant. The Bishops of Rome gave the peoples of Europe many an object lesson on this.

If a town, or a district, or a whole country had offended the Pope and the Curia, it was placed under an _interdict_, and the priests were commanded to refuse the sacraments to the people. They stood between the newborn babe and the initial grace supposed to be bestowed in baptism, and to be absolutely withheld if baptism was not administered; between the dying man and the deathbed grace which was received in extreme unction; between young men and women and legal marriage blessed by G.o.d; between the people and daily wors.h.i.+p and the bestowal of grace in the Eucharist. The G.o.d of grace could not be approached, the blessings of pardon and strength for holy living could not be procured, because the magistrates of a town or the king and councillors of a nation had offended the Bishop of Rome on an affair of worldly policy. The Church, _i.e._ the clergy, who were by the theory enabled to refuse to communicate the grace of G.o.d, barred all access to the G.o.d who had revealed Himself in Christ Jesus. The Pope by a stroke of the pen could prevent a whole nation, so it was believed, from approaching G.o.d, because he could prohibit priests from performing the usual sacramental acts which alone brought Him near. An _interdict_ meant spiritual death to the district on which it fell, and on the mediaeval theory it was more deadly to the spiritual life than the worst of plagues, the Black Death itself, was to the body. An _interdict_ made the plainest intellect see, understand, and shudder at the awful and mysterious powers which a mediatorial priesthood was said to possess.

The fundamental religious experience of Luther had made him know that the Father, who has revealed Himself in His Son, is accessible to every humble penitent and faithful seeker after G.o.d. He proclaimed aloud the spiritual priesthood of all believers. He stated it with his usual graphic emphasis in that tract of his, which he always said contained the marrow of his message-_Concerning Christian Liberty_. He begins by an ant.i.thesis: "A Christian man is the most free lord of all, and subject to none: a Christian man is the most dutiful servant of all, and subject to everyone"; or, as St. Paul puts it, "Though I be free from all men, yet have I made myself servant of all." He expounds this by showing that no outward things have any influence in producing Christian righteousness or liberty; neither eating, drinking, nor anything of the kind, neither hunger nor thirst have to do with the liberty or the slavery of the soul.

It does not profit the soul to wear sacred vestments or to dwell in sacred places; nor does it harm the soul to be clothed in worldly raiment, and to eat and drink in the ordinary fas.h.i.+on. The soul can do without everything except the word of G.o.d, and this word of G.o.d is the gospel of G.o.d concerning His Son, incarnate, suffering, risen, and glorified through the Spirit the Sanctifier. "To preach Christ is to feed the soul, to justify it, to set it free, to save it, if it believes the preaching; for faith alone and the efficacious use of the word of G.o.d bring salvation." It is faith that incorporates Christ with the believer, and in this way "the soul through faith alone, without works, is, from the word of G.o.d, justified, sanctified, endued with truth, peace, liberty, and filled full with every good thing, and is truly made the child of G.o.d." For faith brings the soul and the word together, and the soul is acted upon by the word, as iron exposed to fire glows like fire because of its union with the fire. Faith honours and reveres Him in Whom it trusts, and cleaves to His promises, never doubting but that He overrules all for the best. Faith unites the soul to Christ, so that "Christ and the soul become one flesh."

"Thus the believing soul, by the pledge of its faith in Christ, becomes free from all sin, fearless of death, safe from h.e.l.l, and endowed with the eternal righteousness, life, and salvation of its husband Christ." This gives the liberty of the Christian man; no dangers can really harm him, no sorrows utterly overwhelm him: for he is always accompanied by the Christ to whom he is united by his faith.

"Here you will ask," says Luther, " 'If all who are in the Church are priests, by what character are those whom we now call priests to be distinguished from the laity?' I reply, By the use of these words 'priest,' 'clergy,' 'spiritual person,' 'ecclesiastic,' an injustice has been done, since they have been transferred from the remaining body of Christians to those few who are now, by a hurtful custom, called ecclesiastics. For Holy Scripture makes no distinction between them, except that those who are now boastfully called Popes, bishops, and lords, it calls ministers, servants, and stewards, who are to serve the rest in the ministry of the word, for teaching the faith of Christ and the liberty of believers. For though it is true that we are all equally priests, yet we cannot, nor ought we if we could, all to minister and teach publicly."

The first part of the treatise shows that everything which a Christian man has goes back in the end to his faith; if he has this he has all; if he has it not, nothing else suffices him. In the same way the second part shows that everything that a Christian man does must come from his faith.

It may be necessary to fast and keep the body under; it will be necessary to make use of all the ceremonies of divine service which have been found effectual for the spiritual education of man. The thing to remember is that these are not good works in themselves in the sense of making a man good; they are all rather the signs of his faith, and are to be done with joy, because they are done to the G.o.d to whom faith unites us. So ecclesiastical ceremonies, or what may be called the machinery of Church life, are valuable, and indeed indispensable to the life of the soul, provided only they are regarded in the proper way and kept in their proper place; but they may become harmful and most destructive of the true religious life if they are considered in any other light than that of means to an end. "We do not condemn works," says Luther, "nay we attach the highest value to them. We only condemn that opinion of works which regards them as const.i.tuting true righteousness." They are, he explains, like the scaffolding of a building, eminently useful so long as they a.s.sist the builder; harmful if they obstruct; and at the best of temporary value. They are destructive to the spiritual life when they come between the soul and G.o.d. It follows, therefore, that if through human corruption and neglect of the plain precepts of the word of G.o.d these ecclesiastical usages hinder instead of aid the true growth of the soul, they ought to be changed or done away with; and the fact that the soul of man, in the last resort, needs absolutely nothing but the word of G.o.d dwelling within it, gives men courage and tranquillity in demanding their reformation.

In the same way fellow-men are not to be allowed to come between G.o.d and the human soul; and there is no need that they should. So far as spiritual position and privileges go, the laity are on the very same level as the clergy, for laity and clergy alike have immediate access to G.o.d through faith, and both are obliged to do what lies in them to further the advance of the kingdom of G.o.d among their fellow-men. All believing laymen "are worthy to appear before G.o.d, to pray for others, to teach each other mutually the things that are of G.o.d ... and as our heavenly Father has freely helped us in Christ, so we ought freely to help our neighbours by our body and our works, and each should become to the other a sort of Christ, so that we may be mutually Christs, and that the same Christ may be in all of us; that we may be truly Christians." Luther a.s.serted that men and women living their lives in the family, in the workshop, in the civic world, held their position there, not by a kind of indirect permission wrung from G.o.d out of His compa.s.sion for human frailties, but by as direct a vocation as called a man to what by mistake had been deemed the only "religious life." The difference between clergy and laity did not consist in the supposed fact that the former were a spiritual order of a superior rank in the religious life, while the latter belonged to a lower condition. The clergy differed from the laity simply in this, that they had been selected to perform certain definite duties; but the function did not make him who performed it a holier man intrinsically. If the clergy misused their position and did not do the work they were set apart to perform, there was no reason why they should not be compelled by the laity to amend their ways. Even in the celebration of the holiest rites there was no distinction between clergy and laity save that to prevent disorder the former presided over the rites in which all engaged. At the Eucharist

"our priest or minister stands before the altar, having been publicly called to his priestly function; he repeats publicly and distinctly Christ's words of the inst.i.tution; he takes the Bread and the Wine, and distributes it according to Christ's words; and we all kneel beside him and around him, men and women, young and old, master and servant, mistress and maid, all holy priests together, sanctified by the blood of Christ. We are there in our priestly dignity.... We do not let the priest proclaim for himself the ordinance of Christ; but he is the mouthpiece of us all, and we all say it with him in our hearts with true faith in the Lamb of G.o.d Who feeds us with His Body and Blood."

It was this principle of the Priesthood of all Believers which delivered men from the vague fear of the clergy, and which was a spur to incite them to undertake the reformation of the Church which was so much needed. It is the one great religious principle which lies at the basis of the whole Reformation movement. It was the rock on which all attempts at reunion with an unreformed Christendom were wrecked. It is the one outstanding difference between the followers of the reformed and the mediaeval religion.

Almost all the distinctive principles of the Reformation group themselves round this one thought of the Priesthood of all Believers. It is sufficient for our purpose to look at Justification by Faith, the conceptions of the Holy Scriptures, of the Person of Christ, and of the Church.

-- 3. Justification by Faith.

When Luther, oppressed with a sense of sin, entered the convent, he was burdened by the ideas of traditional religion, that the penitent must prepare himself in some way so as to render himself fit to experience that sense of the grace of G.o.d which gives the certainty of pardon. It was not until he had thoroughly freed himself from that weight that he experienced the sense of pardon he sought. This practical experience of his must always be kept in view when we try to conceive what he meant by Justification by Faith.

As has been already said, Luther recognised that there were two kinds of faith,-one which man himself begot and through which he was able to give a.s.sent to doctrines of some sort; and another which Luther vehemently a.s.serted was the pure gift of G.o.d. The first he thought comparatively unimportant; the latter was all in all to him. Faith is always used in the latter sense when the Reformers speak about _Justification by Faith_; and the sharp distinction which Luther draws between the two is a very important element in determining what he meant when he said that we are justified by faith alone.

This faith of the highest kind, the true faith, has its beginning by G.o.d working on us and in us. It is continually fed and kept strong by the word of G.o.d. The promise of G.o.d on G.o.d's side and faith on man's side are two correlative things; "for where there is no promise, there is no faith."

Luther brings out what this true faith is by contrasting it with the other kind of faith in two very instructive and trenchant pa.s.sages:

"When faith is of the kind that G.o.d awakens and creates in the heart, then a man trusts in Christ. He is then so securely founded on Christ that he can hurl defiance at sin, death, h.e.l.l, the devil, and all G.o.d's enemies. He fears no ill, however hard and cruel it may prove to be. Such is the nature of true faith, which is utterly different from the faith of the sophists (the Schoolmen), Jews, and Turks. Their faith, produced by their thoughts, simply lights upon a thing, accepts it, believes that it is this or that. G.o.d has no dealings with such delusion; it is the work of man, and comes from nature, from the free will of man; and men possessing it can say, repeating what others have said: I believe that there is a G.o.d. I believe that Christ was born, died, rose again for me. But what the real faith is, and how powerful a thing it is, of this they know nothing."(399)

He says again:

"Wherefore, beware of that faith which is manufactured or imagined; for the true faith is not the work of man, and therefore the faith which is manufactured or imagined will not avail in death, but will be overcome and utterly overthrown by sin, by the devil, and by the pains of h.e.l.l. The true faith is the heart's utter trust in Christ, and G.o.d alone awakens this in us. He who has it is blessed, he who has it not is cursed."(400)

This faith has an outside fact to rest upon-the historical Christ. It is neither helped nor hindered by a doctrine of the Person of Christ, nor by a minute and elaborate knowledge of the details of our Lord's earthly ministry. The man who has the faith may know a great deal about the doctrine of the Person of Christ: that will do his faith no harm but good, provided only he does not make the mistake of thinking that doctrines about Christ, ways by which the human understanding tries to conceive the fact, are either the fact itself or something better than the fact. He may know a great deal about the history of Jesus, and it is well to know as much as possible; but the amount of knowledge scarcely affects the faith.

Wayfaring men, though fools, need not err in the pathway of faith.

The faith which is the gift of G.o.d makes us see the practical meaning in the fact of the historic Christ-this, namely, that Jesus Christ is there before us the manifestation of the Fatherly love of G.o.d, revealing to us our own forgiveness, and with it the possibilities of the Kingdom of G.o.d and of our place therein. The fact of the historic Christ is there, seen by men in a natural way; but it is the power of G.o.d lying in the faith which He has given us that makes us see with full certainty the meaning of the fact of the historic Christ for us and for our salvation. Moreover, this vision of G.o.d in the historic Christ, which is the deepest of all personal things, always involves something social. It brings us within the family of the faithful, within the Christian fellows.h.i.+p with its confirming evidences of faith and love. The power of faith comes to us singly, but seldom solitarily; the trust we have in G.o.d in Christ is faintly mirrored in the faith we learn to have in the members of the household of faith, and in their manifestations of faith and the love which faith begets.

What has been called the doctrine of Justification by Faith is therefore rather the description of a religious experience within the believer; and the meaning of the experience is simply this. The believer, who because he has faith-the faith which is the gift of G.o.d, which is our life and which regenerates-is regenerate and a member of the Christian fellows.h.i.+p, and is able to do good works and actually does them, does not find his standing as a person justified in the sight of G.o.d, his righteousness, his a.s.surance of pardon and salvation, in those good works which he really can do, but only in the mediatorial and perfectly righteous work of Christ which he has learned to appropriate in faith. His good works, however really good, are necessarily imperfect, and in this experience which we call Justification by Faith the believer compares his own imperfect good works with the perfect work of Christ, and recognises that his pardon and salvation depends on that alone. This comparison quiets souls anxious about their salvation, and soothes pious consciences; and the sense of forgiveness which comes in this way is always experienced as a revelation of wonderful love. This justification is called an act, and is contrasted with a work; but the contrast, though true, is apt to mislead through human a.n.a.logies which will intrude. It is an act, but an act of G.o.d; and divine acts are never done and done with, they are always continuous.

Luther rings the changes upon this. He warns us against thinking that the act of forgiveness is all done in a single moment. The priestly absolution was the work of a moment, and had to be done over and over again; but the divine p.r.o.nouncement of pardon is continuous simply because it is G.o.d who makes it. He says: