therefore it is open to all to count upon possessing the conditions of faith in God. NOTE.--This essay has, for its sole aim, the reassurance of an existing faith in face of temporary perplexities. It therefore takes faith as a present and possible fact. It assumes man to be a creature who believes. And it tries to show why such belief, if it be there, should not be discouraged by difficulties which belong to the very nature of its original grounds. For this it recalls the depth and security with which the roots of faith run back into the original constitution of man; which original constitution, however broken, thwarted, maimed, polluted by sin, remains still in us as the sole pledge and ground of our possible redemption in Christ, Who comes to restore the blurred image of God in us, and Who must find in us the radical elements of the supernatural nature which He enters to renew. To its enduring existence in the heart of man Christ always appeals. Men are still children of their Father Who is in heaven; and therefore He can demand, as the sole and primal condition of redemption, _Faith_, which is the witness of the unlost sonship. That faith He still assumes to be possible, by the invitation to man to believe and so be healed. He makes this invitation just as if it were in man's own power to respond to it without for the moment touching on the necessity which, through the very effort to believe, man will discover for himself--i.e. the necessity of God's gift of the Spirit to make such belief exist. Such a gift belonged to the original condition of unfallen man, when his _nature_ was itself supernaturally endowed with its adequate and sustaining grace. Such a gift had to be renewed, after the ruin wrought by sin, both by the restoration of the broken sonship within the man through the beloved Son, as well as by the renewal of the evoking and sustaining Spirit that should lift up, from within the inner sonship, its living cry of Abba, Father. The right to believe, and the power to believe, had both to be re-created.