Christ.[60] Peter and John and the other apostles habitually used the word in the same sense, with the modification introduced by Christ's departure. This was enough to make Paul retain for that vital operation, which was the heart of his whole religious system, the name of faith, though he had considerably developed and enlarged the name's usual meaning. Fraught with this new and developed sense, the term does not always quite well suit the cases to which it was in its old sense, with perfect propriety, applied; this, however, Paul did not regard. The term applied with undeniable truth, though not with perfect adequacy, to the great spiritual operation whereto he affixed it; and it was at the same time the name given to the crowning grace of the great father of the Jewish nation, Abraham; it was the prophet Habakkuk's talismanic and consecrated term, _faith_. [Footnote 59: _Gen._, xv, 6; _Habakkuk_, ii, 4.] [Footnote 60: _Mark_, xi, 22.] In this word _faith_, as used by St. Paul,[61] we reach a point round which the ceaseless stream of religious exposition and discussion has for ages circled. Even for those who misconceive Paul's line of ideas most completely, faith is so evidently the central point in his system that their thoughts cannot but centre upon it. Puritanism, as is well known, has talked of little else but faith. And the word is of such a nature, that, the true clue once lost which Paul has given us to its meaning, every man may put into it almost anything he likes, all the fancies of his superstition or of his fanaticism. To say, therefore, that to have faith in Christ means to be attached to Christ, to embrace Christ, to be identified with Christ, is not enough; the question is, to be attached to him _how_, to embrace him _how_? [Footnote 61: With secondary uses of the word, such as its use with the article, '_the_ faith,' in expressions like 'the words of the faith,' to signify the body of tenets and principles received by believers from the apostle, we need not here concern ourselves. They present no difficulty.]