Forty years ago, upon the appearance of a work of the Abbé Bautain, entitled "The Morality of the Gospel compared with the Morality of the Philosophers," I published, in the "Revue Française," an essay upon that state of the human soul which is called Faith, upon the different intellectual facts which it expresses, and the different ways by which man attains to it. Although my special subject, at present, is no longer Faith in its abstract sense, but of Faith in Christ, it is not foreign to my purpose to lay before readers in the year 1868 some passages which appeared in my essay in 1828. For notwithstanding the imperfection of the essay referred to, I have not ceased to regard it as founded on just reasoning; it serves as a starting-point for that Meditation upon Christian Faith which I now give to the press. {154} By the word faith is commonly understood a certain belief in facts or dogmas of a special nature--in facts or dogmas of religion. This word, indeed, has only this meaning, when in speaking of _the faith_ the term is used alone and absolutely. This, however, is neither its sole meaning, nor its fundamental meaning; it has a still more extended sense from which its religious sense is derived. Expressions like the following are met with:--"I have full _faith_ in your words; this man has _faith_ in himself--in his strength--in his fortune, &c." This employment of the word _faith_ in secular matters, so to say, occurs more frequently in the present day; it is, however, no recent invention, and religious ideas have never been so exclusively its sphere that the word faith has not had also other significations attached to it. {155} It appears, then, by the usages of common speech and popular opinion, 1st, that the word _faith_ designates a certain internal condition of the person who believes, and not merely a certain species of belief: that it refers to the nature itself of the conviction, not to its object; 2ndly, that this word was, nevertheless, in its origin, and still is, more generally applied to those kinds of belief termed religious. What then, in its special and ordinary application to religious belief, are the variations which have taken place in its meaning, and which are taking place every day?