would be acts that would please God? It seems to me that, however
lovely and worthy of admiration, looked at with human eyes only, many
lives are, which have nobly and resolutely fought against evil, and
struggled after good, if they have lacked the crowning grace of doing
this for God's sake, they lack, I was going to say, almost everything;
I will not say that, but I will say that they lack that which makes
them acceptable, well-pleasing to Him. The poorest, the most imperfect
realisation of our duty and ideal of conduct which has in it a love
towards God and a faith in Him that would fain do better if it could,
is a nobler thing, I venture to say, in the eyes of Heaven--which are
the truth-seeing eyes--than the noblest achievements of an untrusting
soul. It does not seem to me that to say so is bigotry or narrowness
or anything else but the plain deduction from this, that a man's
relation to God is the deepest thing about him, and that if that be
right, other things will come right, and if that be wrong nothing is
as right as it might be.

Here we have Jesus Christ laying the foundation for the doctrine which
is often said to be Pauline, as if that meant something else than
coming from Jesus Christ. We often hear people say, 'Oh, your
evangelical teaching of justification by faith, and all that, comes
out of Paul's Epistles, not out of Christ's teaching, nor out of
John's Gospel.' Well, there is a difference, which it is blindness not
to recognise, between the seeds of teaching in our Lord's words, and
the flowers and fruit of these seeds, which we get in the more
systematised and developed teaching of the Epistles. I frankly admit
that, and I should expect it, with my belief as to who Christ is, and
who Paul is. But in that saying, 'This is the work of God, that ye
believe on Him whom He hath sent,' is the germ of everything that Paul
has taught us about the works of the law being of no avail, and faith