Hebrews seem to have
been written to meet this danger. The former represents faith as the
inner life of the spirit, the fountain of all active goodness. "Faith,
if it have not works, is dead in itself. Yea, a man will say, Thou hast
faith, and I have works; show me thy faith apart from thy works, and I
by my works will show thee my faith."[251] St. James contends against
the earliest phases of Antinomianism. He reconciles faith and morality,
and maintains that the highest morality springs out of faith. The writer
of the Epistle to the Hebrews contends against legalism,--the proud,
self-satisfied, indifferent, hard, slothful, contemptuous, cynical
spirit, which is quite as truly and as often an abuse of the doctrine of
salvation through faith. It is the terrible plague of those Churches
which have never risen above individualism. When men are told that the
whole of religion consists in securing the soul's eternal safety, and
that this salvation is made sure once for all by a moment's trust in
Christ, their after-life will harden into a worldliness, not gross and
sensual, but pitiless and deadening. They will put on the garb of
religious decorum; but the inner life will be eaten by the canker of
covetousness and self-righteous pride. These are the men described in
the sixth chapter of our Epistle, who have, after a fashion, repented
and believed, but whose religion has no recuperative power, let alone
the growth and richness of deep vitality.

Our author addresses men whose spiritual life was thus imperilled. Their
condition is not that of the heathen world in its agony of despair. He
does not call his readers, in the words of St. Paul to the jailer at
Philippi, to trust themselves into the hands of the Lord Jesus Christ,
that they may be saved. Yet he too insists on faith. He is anxious to
show them that he is not preaching another gospel, but unfolding the
meaning of the same conception of faith, which is the central principle
of the Gospel revealed at the first by Christ to their fathers, and
applied to the wants of the heathen by the Apostle of the Gentiles.

If so, it goes without saying that the writer does not intend to give a
scholastic definition of faith. The New Testament is not the book in
which to seek formal definitions. For his present purpose we require
only to know that, whatever else faith includes, confidence in reference
to the objects of our hope must find a place in it. Faith bridges over
the chasm