The passages already referred to refute the view of the Romanist, that saving faith is simply implicit assent to the doctrines of the church; and the view of the Disciple or Campbellite, that faith is merely intellectual belief in the truth, on the presentation of evidence. The Romanist says that faith can coëxist with mortal sin. The Disciple holds that faith may and must exist before regeneration,—regeneration being completed in baptism. With these erroneous views, compare the noble utterance of Luther, Com. on Galatians, 1:191, 247, quoted in Thomasius, III, 2:183—“True faith,” says Luther, “is that assured trust and firm assent of heart, by which Christ is laid hold of,—so that Christ is the object of faith. Yet he is not merely the object of faith; but in the very faith, so to speak, Christ is present. Faith lays hold of Christ, and grasps him as a present possession, just as the ring holds the jewel.” Edwards, Works, 4:71‐73; 2:601‐641—“Faith,” says Edwards, “includes the whole act of unition to Christ as a Savior. The entire active uniting of the soul, or the whole of what is called coming to Christ, and receiving of him, is called faith in the Scripture.” See also Belief, What Is It? 150‐179, 290‐298. Hatch, Hibbert Lectures, 530—“Faith began by being: 1. a simple trust in God; then followed, 2. a simple expansion of that proposition into the assent to the proposition that God is good, and, 3. a simple acceptance of the proposition that Jesus Christ was his Son; then, 4. came in the definition of terms, and each definition of terms involved a new theory; finally, 5. the theories were gathered together into systems, and the martyrs and witnesses of Christ died for their faith, not outside but inside the Christian sphere; and instead of a world of religious belief which resembled the world of actual fact in the sublime unsymmetry of its foliage and the deep harmony of its discords, there prevailed the most fatal assumption of all, that the symmetry of a system is the test of its truth and the proof thereof.” We regard this statement of Hatch as erroneous, in that it attributes to the earliest disciples no larger faith than that of their Jewish brethren. We claim that the earliest faith involved an implicit acknowledgement of Jesus as Savior and Lord, and that this faith of simple obedience and trust became explicit recognition of our Lord’s deity and atonement just so soon as persecution and the Holy Spirit disclosed to them the real contents of their own consciousness.