victory of faith.

Faith is a theological expression; we are apt to forget that it has
any other than a theological import; yet it is the commonest principle
of man's daily life, called in that region prudence, enterprise, or
some such name. It is in effect the principle on which alone any human
superiority can be gained. Faith, in religion, is the same principle
as faith in worldly matters, differing only in its object: it rises
through successive stages. When, in reliance upon your promise, your
child gives up the half-hour's idleness of to-day for the holiday of
to-morrow, he lives by faith; a future supersedes the present
pleasure. When he abstains from over-indulgence of the appetite, in
reliance upon your word that the result will be pain and sickness,
sacrificing the present pleasure for fear of future punishment, he
acts on faith: I do not say that this is a high exercise of faith--it
is a very low one--but it _is_ faith.

Once more: the same motive of action may be carried on into manhood;
in our own times two religious principles have been exemplified in the
subjugation of a vice. The habit of intoxication has been broken by an
appeal to the principle of combination, and the principle of belief.
Men were taught to feel that they were not solitary stragglers against
the vice; they were enrolled in a mighty army, identified in
principles and interests. Here was the principle of the
Church--association for reciprocated strength; they were thus taught
the inevitable result of the indulgence of the vice. The missionaries
of temperance went through the country contrasting the wretchedness
and the degradation and the filth of drunkenness with the domestic
comfort, and the health, and the regular employment of those who were
masters of themselves. So far as men believed this, and gave up the
tyranny of the present for the hope of the future--so far they lived
by faith.

Brethren, I do not say that this was a high triumph for the principle
of faith; it was in fact, little more than selfishness; it was a high
future balanced against a low present; only the preference of a future
and higher physical enjoyment to a mean and lower one. Yet still to be
ruled by this influence raises a man in the scale of being: it is a
low virtue, prudence, a form of selfishness; yet prudence _is_ a
virtue. The merchant, who forecasts, saves, denies himself
systematically through years, to amass a for