The work of the Holy Spirit - pagina 451

DEFECTIVE LEARNING eration of ministers should once

the conviction by their

own

more resume

411

their studies,

and obtain

experience, even as others have done,

work of study and research, which will bear good fruit for the Church of God, is not yet finished, but really only just begun. Then a generation of more earnest and better-trained men will treat the opinions which we have advanced with a little more appreciation, and, what is of much higher importance, they will treat the being of faith with more thoughtfulness. It is of vital interest that the exercise of faith and the faculty of faith be no longer confounded, and that it be acknowledged the that the

latter

may

be present without the former.

be a complete deviation from also that of the

Otherwise there will

the line of the Scripture,

Reformed churches.

It will

make

which

is

salvation de-

pendent upon the exercise of faith, i.e., upon the act of accepting Christ and all His benefits and since this act is an act, not of God, but of man, we imperceptibly lose our way in the waters of Arminianism. Hence everything depends upon the correct understanding of Ephes. ii. 8. For faith is not the act of believing, but the mere pos;

session of faith, even of faith in the germ.

germ or

faculty of faith,

faith, is saved,

and who

He

that possesses that

at God's time will also exercise

saved by grace, for to him was imparted the

gift of

God. Formerly theologians were used to speak of faith's being and well-being; but this had reference to another distinction, which

must not be confounded with the one thus far treated. Sometimes the plant of faith seems more vigorous in one than in another, and its development riper and fuller, bearing branch, twig, leaf, blossom, and fruit which is evidence of the well-being of faith. It may also be that, in the same person, faith seems to pass through the

—

four seasons of the year: there

grows, followed by a summer,

an autumn when

it

is

first

when

languishes,

it

a spring-tide, in which it but there is also

blossoms

;

and a winter when

it

slumbers.

from the well-hemg of faith to its mere being. But as a tree remains a tree in winter, and will possess the being of a tree even tho it have lost its well-being, so faith may remain still living faith in us, tho temporarily without leaf and blos-

And

this is the transition

som.

For the comfort of souls, our fathers always pointed to the fact, and so do we, that salvation does not depend upon the w^/Z-being

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