But still, with the Creeds as with the Bible, it is the personal intimacy with God in Christ which alone is our concern. We do not, in the strict sense, believe _in_ the Bible, or _in_ the Creeds: we believe solely and absolutely in Christ Jesus. Faith is our living act of adherence in Him, of cohesion with God. But still, once more, we must recognise that this act of adhesion has a history: it has gradually been trained and perfected: and this has been accomplished through the long and perilous experiences recorded in the Old Testament; and it has been consummated in the final sealing of the perfected intimacy attained in Him, in Whose person it was realised and made possible for us: and it has been guarded and secured to us in the face of the overwhelming pressure of eighteen strong, stormy, and distracted centuries. And therefore it is that we now must attain our cohesion with God, subject to all the necessities laid upon us by the fact that we enter on the world's stage at a late hour, when the drama has already developed its plot and complicated its situations. This is why we cannot now, in full view of the facts, believe in Christ, without finding that our belief includes the Bible and the Creeds. V. Faith is, still and always, a spiritual intimacy, a living friendship with God. That is what we must be for ever asserting. That is the key to all our problems; and once sure of this in all its bearings, we shall not be afraid of a taunt which is apt to sting especially those of us who are ordained. It is conveyed, in its noblest form, in a book of Mr. John Morley's, on Compromise. No one can read that book without being the better or the worse for it. The intense force of high moral convictions acts upon us like a judgment. It evokes the deepest conscience in us to come forward, and stand at that austere bar and justify itself, or, in failing to justify itself, sink condemned. And in that book he asks the old question, with unequalled power: how can it possibly be honest for men to sign away their reason at the age of twenty-three?--to commit themselves to conclusions which they cannot have mastered--to anticipate beforehand all that experience may have to teach? In committing themselves to positions which any new knowledge or discovery may reverse, they have forbidden themselves the free use of their critical faculties: they have resigned their intellectual conscience.