Thus when St. Paul came to believe in Jesus Christ, 'faith in Jesus,'--as meaning not merely acceptance of His claim or of His word or of His grace, but {207} whole-hearted devotion to His person, entire self-surrender or self-committal to Christ or God in Christ--became the dominant note of his new state: 'I know him whom I have believed, and I am persuaded that he is able to guard that which I have committed unto him against that day' (2 Tim. i. 12[3]). And this same devotion to Christ becomes, in St. Paul's theology, in its various stages, the only ground of man's acceptance with God. And though he uses 'faith' in a morally lower sense, as distinct from love--the faith which qualifies for miracles (1 Cor. xiii. 2)--yet in his characteristic sense of the term it involves the deepest love towards its divine object[4]. Naturally, as faith is thus _the_ characteristic of Christianity, and this faith in a person involves a belief about Him--His divine sonship, His resurrection, His mission of the Spirit--so 'the faith' comes to mean (objectively) that which the Christian believes, or his creed; and this sense of the word appears almost in the Acts, in Gal. i. 23, and in Eph. iv. 5, and certainly in the Pastoral Epistles frequently (see Dr. Bernard in _Camb. Gr. Test._ on 1 Tim. i. 19) and St. Jude's Epistle, verse 2. [1] We are familiar with the derived adverb of confirmation, 'Amen.' [2] In Rom. iii. 3, Matt, xxiii. 23, it is still used for 'faithfulness.' [3] In spite of Ellicott, Holtzmann, and Bernard, I believe this to be the true rendering, and not that of the R.V. margin. [4] On the development of the principle of faith in the soul, see vol. i. pp. 29, 30; and on its naturalness, in the highest sense, for man, see pp. 21, 22. NOTE B. See vol. i. p. 103. THE USE OF THE WORD 'CONSCIENCE.'