They expected so much more from it. Much it did accomplish, but they took Christ at His word, and expected it to remove mountains; and because sometimes the mountain defied them and did not move, they said, "It is my want of faith. Oh, this evil heart of unbelief! "

Or take a more modern instance, the late Frederick Denison Maurice, who said he could always sympathize with doubters, because his own spirit was full of infidelities of the worst kind. That saintly man, who breathed round him an atmosphere of heavenly serenity so that to enter his presence was like passing from the troubled ocean into the calm waters of the harbour, how could he be the subject of the worst infidelities? Just because he expected so much of his faith and put it to such real uses. His aims were pitched so high. He had such an exalted ideal, and required of himself such undeviating correspondence between his standard and his practice, even in the minutest details of life, that occasional shortcomings were inevitable, and when his faith failed to carry him triumphantly over all obstacles, he accused himself of infidelity.

Faith that is never used, never tested, may be imagined strong. The smug professor who keeps his belief on a high shelf, laid up for a dying hour, or takes it down just once a week for recital in church, dressed out in its Sunday best, the language of the apostle's creed, is ready enough to say, "I believe"; but the man who takes his belief with him into the world, into the toil and strife of the factory, the warehouse, the exchange, the political arena, and puts it to do something, to regulate his conduct

hearten him in opposition, and enable him to overcome the evil round him with good-is often fain to cry, “Lord, help my unbelief."

Take the first article of the apostle's creed by way of example—" I believe in God the Father Almighty -recited by millions of lips every Sunday. In how many is it really alive and operative? Where is the belief when trouble comes, when temptation assails, when solitude environs? You believe in God, the Father Almighty, and yet are at your wit's end, feverish with anxiety, because you don't know how last week's speculation is going to turn out? You believe in God, the Father, Almighty, and yet are agitated with fear, because a little knot of men, or perhaps only one, is bent on doing you mischief? You believe in God the Father Almighty, and yet do violence to His laws for fear of offending some paltry section of His creatures? You believe in God, the Almighty Father, and yet are desolate, inconsolable, undone, because one loved companion is taken from your side, or one lamb from your fold. "Go to," we are ready to say, "You do not believe; you only think you believe." Measure your faith by what it does for you and you will rather have reason to cry, "Lord, help mine unbelief."

The fact is, faith is often taken as merely equivalent to intellectual conviction, or even something less than that. A person without a particle of real faith may say in all simplicity, "I believe in all the articles of the creed," because he has never questioned them, never thought of questioning them, but just given his assent to them as propositions that the Church has sanctioned. But experience

shows that mere unquestioning assent to a number of propositions does not produce reliance on the living God, and that is the only kind of faith that is of any use to a man. It is not the number of things believed that makes a strong Christian, but intense faith in a few things or rather in one Person, the God who has revealed Himself in Jesus Christ. I do not mean to say that the things we are taught about God and about Christ in the creeds and the Bible are of no importance. You must believe certain things about a person before you can really trust in him, rely upon him, reckon on him. But what I do say is, that that trust, that reliance, is the all-important thing. The other beliefs are worth nothing unless they culminate in this. On the other hand, some of them may be dropped or doubted, but where there remains this actual confidence in One who is ever with us, able to do exceeding abundantly above what we ask or think-there is saving faith, a faith that sustains, a faith to live by and die by.

The father in the story before us had a little of this faith, but he wanted more. If he had not some faith of this right kind, he would not have brought his son to Christ at all, nor would he have appealed to him to strengthen his faith. But it was sorely tried. The disciples of Christ had already failed, and there was the boy raving in one of his attacks. We can scarcely wonder at the way he put his request, "If thou canst do anything have compassion on us and help us." But when Christ rejoined," The question is not whether I can do anything, but whether thou canst believe, all things are possible to him that believeth," he became conscious that his faith was

weak, and his mingled hopes and fears burst forth in the cry, "Lord, I believe, help Thou mine unbelief."

II. Here, then, is the second point I want to notice for a moment. He felt his unbelief was a hindrance, and he wanted it out of the way. He had lingering doubts, but he wanted to get rid of them. He stood poles asunder from the man who rather glories in his doubts and denials, and airs them on every possible occasion. He thinks they prove the superiority of his intellect and distinguish him from the vulgar herd. He plumes himself not on what he believes, but on what he disbelieves. Often after a very superficial study of questions that have exercised the greatest minds, he sets aside their conclusions with a contemptuous wave of the hand, and would be profoundly sorry if he were convinced that he had been too hasty, and were compelled to believe against his will. Poor fellow, he has never recognized the fact that doubt as a permanent state of mind is a perfectly useless thing-worse than useless a weakening thing. As a transitory stage as a stimulus to enquiry it has its function. But mere doubt never yet helped a man to do anything. It may paralyse, but can never uphold or energize. No stable structure was ever yet built on mere negations. Men of action have ever been men of strong faith-faith in something.

I am not forgetting what Tennyson wrote:

"There lives more faith in honest doubt,

Believe me, than in half the creeds."

I agree with it but let us understand what he means by it. The creed of many people, as we have seen,

is no more than a loose assent to certain propositions, a theory accepted at second hand of how God wrought in days gone by, and of what He will do in a dim and distant future. Now the man who has found God working here and now in ways that he cannot mistake, in the world around him and in his own heart, cannot always reconcile with this what the Church and the Bible tell him of God and His doings. For a while, at least, he must honestly doubt these things on the ground of the clearer evidence of his personal experience. And if this evidence has begotten in him that active belief in a living God of which we spoke just now, a belief that rules his life, strengthens his will, and shapes his conduct to divine ends, is there not more real faith in his doubting than in half the creeds? He doubts because he has believed-doubts some things which he has been told he ought to believe because they are irreconcilable with what he does, heart and soul, believe. From the bright place within, where God's presence shines with a light that makes clear to him the path of duty, he looks out upon the dim track of the world's history, back to the days of the patriarchs back to the beginning of the race, and tries to find the same God there. It is hard. The God of the patriarchs and the judges does not seem to be the same God that he believes in. Or again-he looks forward to the time when he shall have passed from the scene, when all earthly history shall be ended, and would fain "rest in hope" that the sequel shall be as the glowing words of prophets and apostles have pictured it; but there are thick clouds resting on the past, thick clouds obscuring the future which