fourth, or the tenth year of life, it still remains true that it is too late to employ the method of justification by works.  If you concede any sin at all, at any point whatsoever, in the history of a human soul, you preclude it from salvation by the deeds of the law, and shut it up to salvation by grace.  Go back as far as you can in your memory, and you must acknowledge that you find sin as far as you go; and even if, in the face of Scripture and the symbols of the Church, you should deny that the sin runs back to birth and apostasy in Adam, it still remains true that the first years of your conscious existence were not years of holiness, nor the first acts which you remember, acts of obedience.  Even upon your own theory, you begin with sin, and therefore you cannot be justified by the law.

This, then, is a conclusive reason and ground for the declaration of our Lord, that the one great work which every fallen man has to perform, and must perform, in order to salvation, is faith in another’s work, and confidence in another’s righteousness.  If man is to be saved by his own righteousness, that righteousness must begin at the very beginning of his existence, and go on without interruption.  If he is to be saved by his own good works, there never must be a single instant in his life when he is not working such works.  But beyond all controversy such is not the fact.  It is, therefore, impossible for him to be justified by trusting in himself; and the only possible mode that now remains, is to trust in another.

II.  And this brings us to the second part of our subject.  “This is the work of God, that ye believe on him whom He hath sent.”  It will be observed that faith is here denominated a “work.”  And it is so indeed.  It is a mental act; and an act of the most comprehensive and energetic species.  Faith is an active principle that carries the whole man with it, and in it,—­head and heart, will and affections, body soul and spirit.  There is no act so all-embracing in its reach, and so total in its momentum, as the act of faith in the Lord Jesus Christ.  In this sense, it is a “work.”  It is no supine and torpid thing; but the most vital and vigorous activity that can be conceived of.  When a sinner, moved by the Holy Ghost the very source of spiritual life and energy, casts himself in utter helplessness, and with all his weight, upon his Redeemer for salvation, never is he more active, and never does he do a greater work.

And yet, faith is not a work in the common signification of the word.  In the Pauline Epistles, it is generally opposed to works, in such a way as to exclude them.  For example:  “Where is boasting then?  It is excluded.  By what law? of works?  Nay, but by the law of faith.  Therefore we conclude that a man is justified by faith, without the deeds of the law.  Knowing that a man is not justified by the works of the law but by the faith of Jesus