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victorious for you. He has conquered sin, so that you need not be its servant any longer. Now let Him conquer you by His great love, and so let His victory be complete. For His first victory is all in vain for you and me, unless we thank Him for it, and take Him for our King, and dedicate our obedient lives to Him, and let Him lead us into all the holiness and happiness of His salvation here, and yet more hereafter.

IV.

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 up his columns, as they lie upon their dreary death

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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 harder 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 great deal of money;" and not a few, weary of life, have laid down 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 does 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 doubt, 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

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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 recog nizes; 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 the 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 not 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 rest 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 was, 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 clearsighed, and understood both himself and his work pretty weil.

We want, then, to consider the condition of one who, naving 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

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