makes him more of a man than he was before.  So, there will be infinite variety in the resulting characters.  It is the same force in various forms that rolls in the thunder or gleams in the dewdrops, that paints the butterfly’s feathers or flashes in a star.  All individual idiosyncrasies should be developed in the Christian Church, and will be when its members yield themselves fully to the indwelling Spirit, and can truly declare that the lives which they live in the flesh they live by the faith of the Son of God.

But Paul here regards the measure of faith as itself ’dealt to every man’; and however we may construe the grammar of this sentence there is a deep sense in which our faith is God’s gift to us.  We have to give equal emphasis to the two conceptions of faith as a human act and as a divine bestowal, which have so often been pitted against each other as contradictory when really they are complementary.  The apparent antagonism between them is but one instance of the great antithesis to which we come to at last in reference to all human thought on the relations of man to God.  ’It is He that worketh in us both to will and to do of His own good pleasure’; and all our goodness is God-given goodness, and yet it is our goodness.  Every devout heart has a consciousness that the faith which knits it to God is God’s work in it, and that left to itself it would have remained alienated and faithless.  The consciousness that his faith was his own act blended in full harmony with the twin consciousness that it was Christ’s gift, in the agonised father’s prayer, ’Lord, I believe, help Thou mine unbelief.’

II.  What is a just estimate of our gifts.

The Apostle tells us, negatively, that we are not to think more highly than we ought to think, and positively that we are to ’think soberly.’

To arrive at a just estimate of ourselves the estimate must ever be accompanied with a distinct consciousness that all is God’s gift.  That will keep us from anything in the nature of pride or over-weening self-importance.  It will lead to true humility, which is not ignorance of what we can do, but recognition that we, the doers, are of ourselves but poor creatures.  We are less likely to fancy that we are greater than we are when we feel that, whatever we are, God made us so.  ’What hast thou that thou didst not receive?  Now, if thou didst receive it, why dost thou glory, as if thou hadst not received it?’

Further, it is to be noted that the estimate of gifts which Paul enjoins is an estimate with a view to service.  Much self-investigation is morbid, because it is self-absorbed; and much is morbid because it is undertaken only for the purpose of ascertaining one’s ‘spiritual condition.’  Such self-examination is good enough in its way, and may sometimes be very necessary; but a testing of one’s own capacities for the purpose of ascertaining what we are fit for, and what therefore it is our duty to do, is far more wholesome.