To all this St. Paul would of course have agreed, in St. James' sense of the word faith. In fact, St. James' faith, i.e. bare orthodox belief, is closely akin to, and apt to keep company with, formal ecclesiastical observance, which is part of what St. Paul means by 'works.' Both were characteristic of the Pharisaic Jews. St. Paul and St. James would have been at one in saying, 'There must be life in this dead shell of orthodox belief, if it is to have value with God; and what alone can give it life is the real spirit of moral obedience to the will of the holy and good God'--which is what St. James means by 'works.' The disagreement between them is then, so far, only verbal. But St. Paul goes deeper, into a region where St. James does not follow him, and asks what is the real starting-ground of the truest obedience--the real root of the moral life? And he finds this starting-ground, this fundamental establishment of the right relation to God, in what he called faith; that is, no mere orthodoxy of intellect, but a fundamental relationship of man towards God--the utterly receptive faculty, {170} the profound quality of the self-surrendering will. 3. There is a young philosophical inquirer in Plato's Dialogue of the _Republic_ who is so anxious to get at the ultimate principle of justice, as distinct from its consequences and secondary qualities, that Socrates laughingly tells him he is 'scrubbing and polishing it like a statue.' Now St. Paul has the philosopher's instinct to get at a principle in its pure simplicity. He scrubs faith clean of all extraneous accidents. He is most anxious that we should disengage its activity from all the other closely-interconnected elements in human nature; and so perceive that, whatever a man has been or is in race or conduct or antecedents, once let him exhibit faith, the faith which takes God at His word, and by that very fact and no other, all the obstacles to God's acceptance of him are overcome. The true relation of the man to God is restored in its elementary principle. And nothing but this, however elaborate its apparent performances, can restore the fundamental relationship. It is faith only, and not works, however splendid, which justifies or enables God to take a man, place him amongst the righteous, and work upon and in him. But this elemental {171} act of simply abandoning independence, trampling on pride and taking God at His word, is an act or attitude of the whole man which necessarily (granted that it be not withdrawn) becomes correspondence of the whole being with God, a lifelong obedience, an allegiance and homage of every faculty of will, and emotion, and intellect. 'Faith,' then, as Calvin once said, 'is pregnant with good works, but it justifies before they are brought forth.'