Let the righteous, however baffled his faith be by experience, hold on in loyalty to God and duty, and he shall live. Though St. Paul, as we have said, used the Greek rendering of _faith_ for the enforcement of trust in God’s mercy through Jesus Christ as the secret of forgiveness and life, it is rather to Habakkuk’s wider intention of patience and fidelity that the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews returns in his fuller quotation of the verse: _For yet a little while and He that shall come will come and will not tarry; now the just shall live by faith, but if he draw back My soul shall have no pleasure in him._[393] Such then is the tenor of the passage. In face of experience that baffles faith, the duty of Israel is patience in loyalty to God. In this the nascent scepticism of Israel received its first great commandment, and this it never forsook. Intellectual questions arose, of which Habakkuk’s were but the faintest foreboding—questions concerning not only the mission and destiny of the nation, but the very foundation of justice and the character of God Himself. Yet did no sceptic, however bold and however provoked, forsake his _faithfulness_. Even Job, when most audaciously arraigning the God of his experience, turned from Him to God as in his heart of hearts he believed He must be, experience notwithstanding. Even the Preacher, amid the aimless flux and drift which he finds in the universe, holds to the conclusion of the whole matter in a command, which better than any other defines the contents of the _faithfulness_ enforced by Habakkuk: _Fear God and keep His commandments, for this is the whole of man._ It has been the same with the great mass of the race. Repeatedly disappointed of their hopes, and crushed for ages beneath an intolerable tyranny, have they not exhibited the same heroic temper with which their first great questioner was endowed? Endurance—this above all others has been the quality of Israel: _though He slay me, yet will I trust Him_. And, therefore, as Paul’s adaptation, _The just shall live by faith_, has become the motto of evangelical Christianity, so we may say that Habakkuk’s original of it has been the motto and the fame of Judaism: _The righteous shall live by his faithfulness._ FOOTNOTES: [343]‎ חֲבַקּוּק (the Greek Ἁμβακουμ, LXX. version of the title of this book, and again the inscription to _Bel and the Dragon_, suggests the pointing חַבַּקוּק; Epiph., _De Vitis Proph._—see next note—spells it Ἁββακουμ), from חבק, _to embrace_. Jerome: “He is called ‘embrace’ either because of his love to the Lord, or because he wrestles with God.” Luther: “Habakkuk means one who comforts and holds up his people as one embraces a weeping person.”