Of all the objects of faith, however, faith in Christ is historically the best established, humanly the most intelligible, and as a matter of personal experience the most easily found to be true. If in any man it is not all this, truly and enduringly, then the cause lies in his own will, or absence of will, for which the Gospel of John finds the correct expression, “as many as received him, to them gave he the right to become children of God.” Luther also truly says: “Because the expression ‘to trust God and serve Him’ must be so elastic that every man follows after his own thoughts, and one thinks so and the other thus, therefore He has fixed Himself to a certain place and to a certain person, since He wants to be found and met in such a way that one may not miss Him.” A man’s faith is, therefore, itself no force or power, else superstition must also be such, but all true power in spiritual things is the property of God. But he summons this power and makes its appearance upon earth possible. Only, this is likewise true, that Christianity has no effect in a man whose spirit is unbroken, who has no inner humility, but then it remains an empty form at best. If it is then united with the office of teaching, or with some other pretension of a special position or distinction, it conduces to the man’s destruction. What is regarded in the outer life as an irreparable harm, “a broken existence,” a rent that runs through all the plans of life, is not at all such in the inner; on the contrary, that is the soil in which faith in Christ best prospers, and they of all men are most to be pitied who despair just at the moment when they find themselves in such a position and can not grasp how near they are to salvation. From this moment of humility there enters into man the real regenerative power of the good, which springs from that true righteousness which “counts” with God. His further journey is, on the one hand, much easier than is often represented, for nothing more is now required of the man for which he has not power and insight in sufficient measure, together with a gladness of hope that can no longer be wholly troubled, and with a special, personal guidance that lightens all. But, on the other hand, it is more difficult than is, in this first moment, believed. For life is yet far from its termination; indeed, now is its real starting-point, and there begins a long series of occurrences which all have the purpose of showing man his real nature more clearly than he was in position to bear earlier, and of gradually being no longer indulgent toward him in any respect, as was hitherto in great measure the case. For “Zion shall be redeemed with judgment, and her converts with righteousness.” But all this happens only in the following, or even, now and then, in the final, period of life; before, it would have been quite impossible. III