320 LECTURES AND ESSAYS [1874- 



God, by the aid of the ordinary means of grace, an 

 inclination will be found to imagine that the highest 

 religious experiences dispense with these means alto 

 gether. In extreme cases, of course, this tendency leads 

 to claims of special inspiration. But it is not in its 

 extremest forms that the tendency does most harm, for 

 then its falseness is easily seen. More generally what is 

 put in the place of the objective converse of faith with 

 God is some kind of subjective emotion or persuasion. 

 Faith, instead of going outwards towards God in Christ, 

 is turned inward upon itself. It is supposed that a 

 man is saved by believing that he is saved, by gaining, 

 through some kind of empirical experience, a conviction 

 that he has passed from death to life. Of course such a 

 faith is not belief in God, but in something internal to 

 oneself, and therefore has no necessary relation to any 

 true knowledge of God, and gives no starting-point for 

 a theology. But the people who hold these views still 

 use the name of justification by faith, and so often 

 imagine that they are sound Protestants. In reality they 

 are a kind of Protestant mystics, greatly inferior to the 

 old mystics in richness of aesthetic fancy and warmth 

 of religious feeling ; and when they become sufficiently 

 conscious of their own position to separate themselves 

 from the Church, they form these monotonous sects, 

 whose one spiritual weapon is the ever repeated question, 

 &quot; Have you believed ? &quot; and whose theology consists 

 wholly of abusive polemic and millenarian dreams. 



It is plain, from what has already been said, that the 

 tendency to depreciate theology which marks a leaning 

 towards these views must be met in the first place by 

 emphasising the true Protestant view of faith, and of 

 its relation to the Word of God. It must not, however, 

 be supposed that when due stress is laid on these points 

 everything is done which is necessary to vindicate for 

 theology its proper place. Indeed, at this part of the 

 argument an error is frequently committed, which, 



