CHAPTER VI. JUSTIFICATION BY FAITH. BY H . C. G. MOULE, D. D., BISHOP OF DURHAM, ENGLAND.
“Justification by Faith” ; the phrase is weighty alike with Scripture and with history. In Holy Scripture it is the main theme of two great dogmatic epistles, Romans and Galatians. In Christian history it was the potent watchword of the Ref ormation movement in its aspect as a vast spiritual upheaval of the church. It is not by any means the only great truth considered in the two epistles; we should woefully misread them if we allowed their message about Justification by Faith to obscure their message about the Holy Ghost, and the strong relation between the two messages. It was not the only great truth which moved and animated the spiritual leaders of the Reformation. Nevertheless, such is the depth and dignity of this truth, and so central in some respects is its reference to other truths of our salvation, that we may fairly say that it was the message of St, Paul, and the truth that lay at the heart of the distinctive messages of the non-Pauline epistles too, and that it was the truth of the great Reformation of the Western church. With reason, seeing things as he was led in a profound experience to see them, did Luther say that Justification by Faith was “the articles of a standing or a falling church.” With reason does an illustrious representative of the older school of “higher” Anglicanism, a name to me ever bright and venerable, Edward Harold Browne, say that Justification by Faith is not only this, but also “the article of a standing or a falling soul.”* *“Messiah Foretold and Expected,” ad finem. 106
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