FAITH AND SIGHT CONTRASTED.

BY

A. T. M'GILL, D. D.

PROFESSOR IN THE WESTERN THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY, ALLEGHANY, PENNA.

For we walk by faith, not by sight.-2 COR. 5—7.

Ir is a singular fact, in the history of redemption, that the faculty in man, which deceived him to his ruin at the first, is never restored to perfect confidence this side of heaven. That faculty is sense, in the widest acceptation of the term, which we here extend to internal emotion as well as external perception. While, in the direction of ordinary life, the most simple and unerring of all evidence is that of the senses, in the great duty of dealing with God, in reference to the conduct, acceptance, and everlasting welfare of the soul, it is the most imperfect and fallacious of all reliances. Through this avenue sin entered, and God seems to have closed it indignantly against all further intercourse with him, while we continue in this evil tenement. As if it were some facile door, through which thieves and robbers once entered, and would still enter, to mar and spoil the house, the glorious Builder will have it opened no more, in spiritual communication with himself, until the whole building shall be taken

down, and reconstructed on the model or a glorious immortality.

Through the senses it was that the tempter first invaded the soul; "when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof and did eat, and gave also to her husband with her, and he did eat." Now that eye, that ear, that touch, that taste, that sense of every kind is all disparaged in the remedial dealing of God; and faith is the eye, the ear, the touch, the taste, the one all engrossing faculty by which grace renovates and rules the soul. Religion and the senses are divorced. These are degraded to the rank of handmaiden; and never will the soul repose with confidence upon them more, until error and frailty shall have been for ever removed. The apostle intimates, in this connection, that we shall hereafter walk by sight. When appearances will no longer deceive us; when the highest good will be for ever present to the soul; when the senses will be gloriously transformed, and made perfect in heaven, we shall walk by what we do see and know. But, for the present, wherever there is spiritual life,

I. We walk by faith, and not by carnal sight. II. We walk by faith, and not by spiritual sight. III. We walk by faith, and not by glorified sight.

I. "All men have not faith." There is all the difference between those who have this grace, and those who have it not, that another sense would make in the range of man's power and enjoyment. How immeasurably wider the perceptions of a blind man, when suddenly admitted or restored to the

window of the eye. Where he had groped along, and stumbled with faltering footsteps, a wide, and distant, and adorned horizon bursts upon his view. More extended, more enchanting, more important unspeakably, is the enlargement when God restores the eye of faith to the soul. It sees a guide, a chart, a destination, which the spiritually blind can never perceive. It spreads another hue on all it scans; inspires new emotions, new estimations, and animates to incomparably greater speed the career on which it enters the soul.

1. Sight regards only things which are seen; but faith, things which are not seen. (2 Cor. iv. 18.) It could not be otherwise with maimed and defective nature than to seek those things only which its powers are fitted to perceive. We may crowd assurances of divine realities upon the natural man, and compel his assent to the evidence that they are realities of momentous import, and yet he is no more actuated by them, in his conduct, than is the deaf man by all the harmonies of music. There may be a notional apprehension entertained with zeal. Men, from what they read in the Word of God, and what they see in the conduct of others, and what they love by the dint of habit, and what they fear by the force of conscience and superstition, may seem to walk at times as though divine realities were believed, when all the while it is but sight that actuates them. Every thing short of the faith, which fixes a clear, and calm, and steadfast, and transforming reliance on the Lord Jesus Christ, "whom, having not seen, we love; in whom, though now we see him not, yet believing, we rejoice with joy unspeak

able and full of glory;" every thing short of the faith which "endures as seeing him who is invisi ble," is sight; which gathers all its motives and activity from what is visible and palpable.

2. Sight regards what is present, faith what is future. It is "the substance of things hoped for," as well as "the evidence of things not seen." It is its great peculiarity, not only to displace palpable things in their power on the heart, by things of purely fiducial realization, but to grasp these as they lie in futurity also. It is not only impossible that the natural man be influenced by what is unseen, more than what is seen and felt, but still more, that he be influenced by unseen realities, in anticipation, more than by what is in present and actual contact with his feelings and desires. Without true faith, to fill up the void with animating hopes of the future, religion, which sweeps from the soul its temporal gratifications, would be an agonizing emptiness-the most intolerable of all conditions. All men would forsake it, like Demas, through love of this present world. Sight is always spreading enchantment over the present scene. Fast as experience detects the mockery of one illusion, she spreads another and a fresh attraction, persuading the soul, in spite of its sober convictions, to live as though its inward thought were, "this house shall continue for ever, this dwelling place to all generations." But faith unmasks the charm, and however faintly done, holds the future with steady and constraining influence before us; all is disenchanted at her touch; the world is a wilderness; the soul is made to come up from it, leaning on none of its pleasures, repos

ing on none of its confidences-leaning on "the beloved" alone. "But now they desire a better coun try, that is an heavenly; wherefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he hath prepared for them a city." While the companions of a believer, like the children of Reuben, are always choosing their inheritance on this side of Jordan, his eye is onward and over to Canaan itself. While one takes up with this, and another with that earthly portion, "God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of the Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world is crucified to me, and I unto the world."

3. Sight regards what is pleasant; faith what is good. It is pleasant to choose a broad and downward way through this rugged and inhospitable world; and to crowd the way with as large a company as possible, where we have so many mutual wants and dependencies-pleasant to incur the reproach or disfavour of no one in the journey, but go hand in hand with the multitude, who "measure themselves by themselves, and compare themselves among themselves." It is pleasant to avoid every high hill and threatening danger on the road; and to turn away backward, or wind circuitously onward, rather than encounter hardships and perils in the straightest course. But faith gives other counsel. "Enter in at the straight gate; for wide is the gate and broad is the way that leadeth to destruction, and many there be that go in thereat." "Be not conformed to this world." "The fear of man bringeth a snare; but whoso putteth his trust in the Lord shall be safe." "Cursed is the man that trusteth in man, and maketh flesh his arm, and whose heart