It is true, there are other hindrances to faith, intellectual difficulties of great weight and seriousness, that press upon many minds. For such men Christ has all possible sympathy and patience. There is a real, though hidden faith that “lives in honest doubt.” Some men have more faith than they suppose, while others certainly have much less. One has a name to live, and yet is dead; another, perchance, has a name to die, and yet is alive to God through Jesus Christ. There are endless complications, self-contradictions, and misunderstandings in human nature. “Many are first” in the ranks of religious profession and notoriety, “which shall be last, and the last first.” We make the largest allowance for this element of uncertainty in the line that bounds faith from unfaith; “The Lord knoweth them that are His.” No intellectual difficulty, no mere misunderstanding, will ultimately or for long separate between God and the soul that He has made. It is _antipathy_ that separates. “They did not like to retain God in their knowledge”; that is Paul’s explanation of the ungodliness and vice of the ancient world. And it holds good still in countless instances. “Numbers in this bad world talk loudly against religion in order to encourage each other in sin, because they need encouragement. They know that they ought to be other than they are; but are glad to avail themselves of anything that looks like argument, to overcome their consciences withal” (Newman). The fashionable scepticism of the day too often conceals an inner revolt against the moral demands of the Christian life; it is the pretext of a carnal mind, which is “enmity against God, because it is not subject to His law.” Christ’s sentence upon unbelief as He knew it was this: “Light is come into the world; and men love darkness rather than light, because their deeds are evil.” So said the keenest and the kindest judge of men. If we are refusing Him our faith, let us be very sure that this condemnation does not touch ourselves. Is there no passion that bribes and suborns the intellect? no desire in the soul that dreads His entrance? no evil deeds that shelter themselves from His accusing light? When the apostle says of his Gentile readers that they “once walked in the way of the age, according to the course of this world,[76] according to the prince of the power of the air,” the former part of his statement is clear enough. The age in which he lived was godless to the last degree; the stream of the world’s life ran in turbid course toward moral ruin. But the second clause is obscure. The “prince” (or “ruler”) who guides the world along its career of rebellion is manifestly Satan, the spirit of darkness and hate whom St Paul entitles “the god of this world” (2 Cor. iv. 4), and in whom Jesus recognized, under the name of “the prince of the world,” His great antagonist (John xiv. 30).