, if so, that would be beautiful, but I rather take it
that he is tacitly contrasting in his own mind the difference between
the Gentile converts as a whole, and the members of the Jewish community
who had become believers in Jesus Christ, and that he is repeating the
lesson that he had learned on the housetop at Joppa, and had had further
confirmed to him by the experience of Caesarea, and that he is really
saying exactly what he said when he defended himself before the Council
in Jerusalem: 'Seeing that God had given unto them the like gift that he
did unto us, who was I, that I should withstand God?' And so he looks
out over all the Christian community, and ignores 'the middle wall of
partition,' and says, 'Them that have obtained like precious faith with
us.' I wish very simply to try to draw out the thoughts that lie in
these words, and cluster round that well-worn and threadbare theological
expression and Christian verity of 'faith' or 'trust.'

I. And the first thing that I would desire to point you to is, what we
learn here as to the object of faith.

Now those of you who are using the Revised Version will notice that
there is a very slight, but important, alteration there, from the
rendering in the old translation. We read in the latter: 'Like precious
faith with us _through_ the righteousness, ...' and that is a meaning
that might be defended. But the Revised Version says, and says more
accurately as far as the words go, and more truly as far as Christian
thought goes, 'them that have obtained like precious faith with us _in_
the righteousness.' Now, I daresay, it will occur to us all that that is
a departure from the usual form in which faith is presented to us in the
New Testament, because there, thank God! we are clearly taught that the
one thing which faith grapples is not a thing but a Person. Christian
faith is only human trust turned in a definite direction. Just as our
trust lays hold on one another, so the object of faith is, in the
deepest analysis, no doctrine, no proposition, not even a Divine fact,
not even a Divine promise, but the Doer of the fact, and the Promiser of
the promise, and the Person, Jesus Christ. When you say, 'I trust
so-and-so's word!' what you mean is, 'I trust _him_, and so I put
credence in his word.' And Christianity would have been delivered from
mountains of misconception, and many a poor soul would have felt that a
blaze of light had come in upon it, if this had been clear