But, leaving such discussions, let us consider the office of faith in producing holiness, and examine in what way it pleases God to purify the heart through faith. We shall find that He does it in two ways. (1.) By the introduction of new motives and principles. He does not deal with us as though we were without mind, but by the use of the mind which He Himself has given. The refiner refines the silver, but the silver has no voice in the transaction: it is simply acted upon as lifeless matter. But it is not so with the soul: the soul can think, can feel, can sorrow, can rejoice, can love; and when God refines it He calls into activity all its faculties. In purifying the heart He makes use of its powers, and so consecrates them to His most sacred service. For example, there is no greater power in the whole mind of man than love. People will make any sacrifices under the influence of a powerful affection; God therefore takes that faculty of love, and so consecrates it to His own sacred service, that the people of God may say, ‘The love of Christ constraineth us.’ And now you see in a moment the office of faith. How is that love to grow up within the soul if there be no faith preceding it? If you have no trust in His reconciling grace,—if it is all a matter of uncertainty to you whether He is loving you as a child, or about to cast you as a condemned criminal into hell,—I cannot see what there is to call forth any love within your heart. St. John says, ‘We love Him because He first loved us;’ so that if there is no trust in His first love the motive is gone, and there is no power by which love in us can be produced. But when, on the other hand, we can believe His boundless grace,—believe that He gave Himself to be sin for us with as little doubt as if we actually saw Him on the cross,—believe that we are already forgiven through His blood, and, though so unworthy, made the righteousness of God in Him,—believe, in short, that He is fulfilling to us that most precious promise in Hosea, ‘I will love them freely, for mine anger is turned away from him,’ and all because the Son of God was content in our place to die,—then there is something to call forth love in the hardest heart that ever beat; something that must make sin in all its forms inexpressibly hateful; something to produce those sacred results of constraining love described by St. Paul, when he said, ‘That they which live should not henceforth live unto themselves, but unto Him that died for them, and rose again.’