+III. Faith, the instrument of salvation, is the gift of Divine grace+ (ver. 8).--The question whether faith or salvation is the gift of God is decided by the majority of critics in favour of the former. This agrees with the obvious argument of the apostle, that salvation is so absolutely an act of Divine grace that the power to realise it individually is also a free gift. Grace, without any respect to human worthiness, confers the glorious gift. Faith, with an empty hand and without any pretence to personal desert, receives the heavenly blessing. Without the grace or power to believe, no man ever did or can believe; but with that power the act of faith is a man's own. God never believes for any man, no more than He repents for him. The penitent, through this grace enabling him, believes for himself; nor does he believe necessarily or impulsively when he has that power. The power to believe may be present long before it is exercised, else why the solemn warnings which we meet everywhere in the Word of God and threatenings against those who do not believe? This is the true state of the case: God gives the power, man uses the power thus given, and brings glory to God. Without the power no man can believe; with it any man may. +IV. Salvation, being unmeritorious, excludes all human boasting.+--"Not of works, lest any man should boast" (ver. 9). Neither salvation nor the faith that brings it is the result of human ingenuity and effort. The grand moral results brought about by saving faith are so extraordinary, and so high above the plane of the loftiest and most gigantic human endeavours, that if man could produce them by his own unaided powers he would have cause indeed for the most extravagant boasting, and he would be in danger of generating a pride which in its uncontrollable excess would work for his irretrievable ruin. The least shadow of a ground for pride is however excluded. God protects both Himself and man by the freeness and simplicity of the offer of salvation. It is the complaint of intellectual pride that the reception of the Gospel is impossible because it demands a humiliation and self-emptying that degrade and shackle intellectual freedom. Such an objection is a libel on the Gospel. It humbles in order to exalt; it binds its claims upon us to lift us to a higher freedom. So completely is salvation a Divine act, that the man who refuses to accept it on God's terms must perish. There is no other way.