foe can get at us who cannot break
down or climb over the encircling wall of defence. An army in an enemy's
country will march in hollow square, and put its most precious
treasures, or its weaker members, its sick, its women, its children, its
footsore, into the middle there, and with a line of lances on either
side, and stalwart arms to wield them, the feeblest need fear no foe. We
'are kept in the power of God unto salvation.'

But do not forget how, far beyond the psalmist and prophet, and in
something far more sublime and wonderful than a poetic figure, the New
Testament catches up the same phrase, and gives us, as the condition of
vitality, as the condition of fertility, as the condition of
tranquillity, as the condition of security, the same thing--'in Christ.'
Remember His very last words prior to His great intercessory prayer, in
which He spoke about keeping those that were given Him in His name. And
just before that He said to them, 'In the world ye shall have
tribulation, but in Me ye shall have peace.' Kept, guarded as behind the
battlements of some great fort, which has in its centre a quiet,
armoured chamber into which no noise of battle, nor shout of foeman, can
ever come. 'In Christ,' though the world is all in arms without, 'ye
shall have peace.' 'Guarded in the power of God unto salvation.'

III. Lastly, what we are kept through.

'Through faith.' Now there we come across another of the words which we
know so well that we do not understand them. You all think that it is
the right thing for me to preach about 'faith.' I daresay some of you
have never tried to apprehend what it means. And I daresay there are a
great many of you to whom the utterance of the word suggests that I am
plunging into the bathos and commonplaces of the pulpit. Perhaps, if you
would try to understand it, you would find it was a bigger thing than
you fancied. What is faith? I will give you another expression that has
not so many theological accretions sticking to it, and which means
precisely the same thing--trust. And we all know that we do not trust
with our heads, but with our hearts and wills. You may believe
undoubtedly, and have no faith at all, for it is the heart and the will
that go forth, and clutch at the thing trusted; or, as I should rather
say, at the person trusted; for, at bottom, what we trust is always a
person, and even when we 'trust to nature,' it is because, more or less
clearly, we feel that somehow or oth