Salvation by Grace 121 in the great congregation, “is everything for nothing !—Christ free!—Pardon free!—Heaven free!” Thanks be to God for a gratuitous salvation! But is faith, also, the gift of God ? Assuredly it is, if only because it is one of the most precious faculties of the human heart. What have we that we have not received ? But faith in Christ is, in a very special sense, a Divine gift. “Not that something is given us which is different from absolute trust as exercised in other cases, but that such trust is divinely guided and fixed upon the right object. Gracious manifesta tions of the soul’s need, and of the Lord’s glory, prevail upon the will to repose trust upon that object.” To trust is natural, but to trust Christ, rather than self, or ceremonies, is super natural—it is tfiegift of God. Moreover, faith, to be worthy of the name, must not be dry-eyed, and who can melt the heart and turn the flint into a fountain of waters but the God of all Grace? “The Grace that made me feel my sin, I t taught me to believe; Then, in believing, peace I found, And now I live, I live.” Nor is it to be supposed that Grace has done with us as soon as we have believed. The mighty call of Grace that re sults in our awakening is but the beginning of good things. Grace keeps us to the end. It will not let us go. It is the morning and the evening star of Christian experience. It puts us in the way, helps us by the way, and takes us all the way f “ lest any man should boast ” It is difficult to imagine by what other process salvation could have been secured, consistently with God’s honor. Sup pose, for a moment, that salvation by works were a possible alternative. Boasting, so far from being excluded, would be ir.vited. Man would boast in prospect. How proud he Would
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