INCREASE OF FAITH NECESSARY TO THE

SUCCESS OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS.

BY

REV. WILLIAM R. WILLIAMS, D. D.

But having hope, when your faith is increased, that we shall be enlarged by you according to our rule abundantly, to preach the Gospel in the regions beyond you. 2 CORINTHIANS 10: 15, 16.

THE language of the Apostle evidently implies a gentle reprehension of the Corinthian church. The poverty and imbecility of their faith embarrassed him in his ardent aspirations after more extended usefulness. He was anxious to enter upon a new field, and to proclaim the Gospel throughout other and more destitute regions. But he must await in prayerful hope the increase of their faith, and at their hands expect an enlargement. This enlargement, might be, on their part, an advancement and confirmation in Christian doctrine, which should permit him to transfer the charge of these, his children in the faith, into the hands of less skilful pastors; or a rapid growth in Christian holiness, which should justify the Apostle in presenting them as his epistle, to be seen and read of all men, attesting alike the power of the Gospel, and the reality of his mission. Or he might desire the vindication of his own apostolical character, which had been cruelly assailed in their midst, and ask the transmission of his name, with its well-won honors, to the neighboring heathen. Or it had been, perhaps, his hope, from their liberality and wealth, to have received aid in his missionary journeyings; or he had anticipated from their position in a great commercial metropolis, assistance in their sending the Gospel to other havens and cities of the empire. Whether he expected from their increased and matured faith, any one, or the union of all these advantages, and whatever be the decision as to the mode in which enlargement was sought by him, one fact stands

forth on the face of these words, manifest and unquestionable. He was now fettered in his plans of benevolence, and it was from the Corinthian disciples that he expected his release. Either from their confirmation in the truths he preached, or in the holiness he enjoined and exemplified; or from their assertion of his just honors as an apostle; from the bestowment of their free alms, or the employment of their mercantile influence, he hoped to obtain the removal of the restraint from himself, and to secure for their pagan neighbors blessings untold and priceless. The fulfilment of his hope depended upon their progress to higher attainments in faith. There is involved, then, in these words of an inspired and most successful missionary, a principle which we would now endeavor to bring before you, that

The missionaries of the church require at her hands, for the extension and success of their efforts, an increase of faith. Looking to the divisions and scandals he had so sternly rebuked, and to the peculiar temptations of the infant church, which had been gathered amid the luxury, gayety, and profligacy of the licentious Corinth, we might have expected, from one versed as was Paul in the weakness of our nature, and in the wiles of its great adversary, that he would have chosen to specify, instead of the one evil of unbelief, other and numerous impediments to his success. And using the term here employed by him, as we too often do, to describe a knowledge merely speculative and theoretical, we should have supposed that in a community indoctrinated by the personal labors of an apostle, as well as in the churches of our own age and land, the deficiencies of Christians were to be sought, rather in their works of obedience, than in the amount of their faith. Yet such was not the fact then. Such is not the root of the evil now. It is in faith that we are wanting. The elder and parent grace is maimed and infirm, and the whole family and sisterhood of the Christian virtues languish at she decays, and can be reanimated only by her restoration. Having considered, therefore,

I. THE NATURE AND IMPORTANCE OF TRUE FAITH,

II. THE INTIMATE CONNEXION BETWEEN ITS HIGHER DEGREES AND THE MISSIONARY EFFORTS OF THE CHURCH

will naturally follow and prepare us to examine,

III. THE DEFECTIVE FAITH OF OUR OWN CHURCHES, AS INTERPOSING A HINDRANCE TO THE TRIUMPHS OF THE GOSPEL OVER HEATHENISM.

And may the Father of lights, by His own Spirit of illumination and power, unfold to the mind, and impress upon the heart, the humbling but the salutary truth contained in these words.

I. The importance of faith may be discerned from the dignity and rank assigned it throughout the New Testament. In the commencement and at the close of our Saviour's ministry; in his own private conference with the anxious, but irresolute Nicodemus, and in the public message with which his apostles were charged, as he sent them forth to the evangelization of the world, it is alike represented as the only mode - the one condition of salvation. He that exercises it is not condemned, while he that believeth not shall be damned. To this principle is ascribed our immunity from the terrors of the law, for we are justified by faith. As a shield, it repels the fiery darts of temptation that come from the great adversary of God and man; while within, it purifies the heart, working by love; and, in our contest with the ungodly precepts and example of our fellow-men, "this is the victory that overcometh the world, even our faith." The long and glorious list of its strifes and its trophies, contained in the closing portion of the Epistle to the Hebrews, commences with the announcement that faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen; and is terminated with the triumphant recapitulation that all these, the worthies of the earlier dispensations, obtained their good report through the same simple, but mighty principle that of faith.

And although the world are accustomed to dispute the necessity of this principle, when exercised respecting the realities of a world as yet hidden and invisible, they are perpetually employing it with regard to the visible but transient scenery of the present life. Compelled to give their faith to testimony as to those things which might be seen, and often giving it even where they might substitute personal observation for faith in the evidence of others; they refuse to extend it to those objects which, from their very nature, cannot become the subjects of immediate vision and examination. Yielding credence to the testimony of their fellow-mortals, though the witnesses are alike fallible and perfidious, they refuse it to the revelation of their God. Preferring to give it where it is often not required, (did they choose to employ their own natural faculties,) they withhold it where it is inevitably necessary. All the commerce of this world is pre

dicated on the faith which man puts in the skill, integrity, and diligence of his fellow-man; and a writing, of which he never saw the author, shall be to him a sufficient warrant for transmitting, far beyond his own sight and control, his whole property. By the exercise of a just and sober faith in the testimony brought into her halls, the national jurisprudence administers to our citizens the redress of their wrongs, and the punishment of their crimes. The learning dispensed in our colleges is, by the mass of minds, received without personal examination, upon the credit given to the ability and honesty of previous investigators. And all education, whether in the most recondite science, or in the most humble and handicraft art, proceeds upon the faith which the pupil is required to exercise in the superior skill of his instructor, and in the value of the knowledge his teacher is preparing to communicate.

It is only by the confidence they have learned to place in the narratives of the traveller, that the majority of society know the nature and extent of the country, of which they are themselves the inhabitants; or that they can form any idea of the great and magnificent cities, the goodly prospects, and the splendid wonders that adorn some foreign and unseen coast. And with regard to the facts which we have thus gathered, we feel no suspicion, but use them as the current coin of the mind, both in our private meditations and our social intercourse, without fear as to their genuineness and validity. Even the skeptic, loud and boisterous in his rejection of all faith, as being an invasion of the province, and but an usurpation upon the rights of human reason, is most rigid and constant in exacting from his trembling child an obedience to his will, and a subjection to his opinions, which can rest only upon the faith, the tacit but implicit faith, which he requires his family to exercise in his superior wisdom and larger experience.

And if it be objected, that the faith of the gospel differs widely from that which we so readily and commonly render, in that it brings to our minds deep and difficult mysteries, we answer that it would be less evidently the work of God, if it did not come, contradicting the first and rasher conclusions of human ignorance. It would be a departure from the analogy which exists among all the works of our God, did it only reveal what man had previously conjectured, and were Faith employed merely to endorse and register, in silent acquies

cence, the rescripts which had been prepared for her by human reason. And even in the sciences of this world, narrow and near as is the field of their labors, there are the same inscrutable yet inevitable difficulties, of which the sceptic complains in religion. We expect it of a cultivated and advanced science, that it should assail and overturn many opinions, which to the first glance of ignorant presumption seem indisputable truths. Contradicting the first and incomplete testimony of our senses and the general impressions of mankind, Geography comes back from her voyages of discovery with the annunciation that the earth is not an extended plain, but one vast sphere. And though the eye sees no motion, and the foot feels no unsteadiness, and no jarring is perceived within or around us, Astronomy comes back to the inquirer with the startling assurance, that, notwithstanding all these seeming evidences to the contrary, the earth on which he reposes is ceaselessly and most rapidly whirling along its trackless path in the heavens; and that, moment by moment, he is borne along through the fields of space with a fearful and inconceivable velocity. And when, from further wanderings, but on better testimony, when from a higher and stranger world, but with fuller evidence and with more indubitable tokens of her veracity, Faith comes back, bringing assurances that tally not in all things with our preconceived conjectures, shall she be chidden and blasphemed for the difficulties that arise from our own ignorance? Without the mysteries of the Gospel, revelation would be unlike all the other provinces of human knowledge, and the domains of Faith would be dissimilar from all the rest of the handiwork of God.

But although the importance of faith is thus apparent from the rank assigned it in the scriptures, and from its necessity even in the petty concernments of this present life, we shall learn to appreciate true belief yet more highly, when we see mankind, by a heedless but perpetual infatuation, allowing themselves in errors the most absurd and dangerous, with regard to its character and claims. By some it is confounded with a blind and irrational credulity, although evangelical faith is based only on evidence the most satisfactory and sufficient; and although the book of God, when demanding our credence, proffers to the inquirer testimony, not merely abundant, but overwhelming, as to the nature of its authorship. It is as adverse to the character of scriptural faith to believe