Chapter X: Dead Faith and Living Faith

“MAMMA, I’ve been trying to find a type; I’ve been looking all through my Bible pictures,” said blue-eyed Elsie.

“And did you succeed in finding a type, my darling?” asked Mrs. Temple, smiling at the gravity of the child, whom she thought scarcely likely to be able to discover the meaning of the most simple Scripture figure.

“I don’t know—I’m not sure,” said little Elsie; “but I’ve found two pictures—one in the Old Testament and one in the New Testament—and they are rather like each other; so, you know, dear mamma, it seemed as if one might be a sort of a type.”

“And what were your pictures about, Elsie, pet?” asked Lucius, stroking the hair of his youngest sister, of whom the schoolboy was very fond.

“One picture was of Elijah raising the poor widow’s son, and the other was of the Lord’s raising a widow’s son. These were two things like each other,” said Elsie; “but,” she added, shaking her curly head thoughtfully, “I can’t tell if there was any type.”

“I daresay that little Elsie is right, and that Elijah _was_ a type of the Lord!” cried Lucius, “for did they not both fast forty days in the wilderness?”

“I thought that Elijah was rather a type of John the Baptist,” observed Agnes.

“Yes, he was so,” said Mrs. Temple. “Our Lord’s own words show that John, ‘the Voice crying in the wilderness,’ came in the spirit and power of the prophet Elijah, though John worked no miracle. Yet in the two instances which your brother and Elsie have noticed, the raising of the dead and the forty days’ fast in the desert, Elijah’s history shadows forth that of One far greater than himself. Has my dove Amy thought of any Scripture type?” said the mother, turning towards her young daughter.

Amy hesitated a little; she was always distrustful of herself, and in this was a great contrast to Elsie. Mrs. Temple smiled encouragingly upon her little girl. “I see that there is something in your head,” said the mother; “tell us, my love, what you have thought of. If you have made a mistake, I will try to set you right; we are at least likely to gain some increase of Scriptural knowledge by talking over such subjects as these.”

“I thought at first that I should never find out anything,” said Amy; “though you explained to us so much about types this morning, dear mamma, I felt quite puzzled when I tried to make out one for myself. At last a verse from the third chapter of John came into my mind, and I wondered whether our Lord Himself taught Nicodemus in it something about a type. Perhaps Nicodemus understood the Lord’s meaning, but I could not understand it—that is to say, not clearly—so I thought that I had better ask you about it, mamma.”

“What is the verse?” asked several voices at once.

Amy folded her hands reverentially as she repeated the sacred words once spoken by our blessed Redeemer. Mrs. Temple would never allow her children to gabble over carelessly any verse of Scripture.—“‘_As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whosoever believeth Him should not perish, but have eternal life_,’” (John iii. 14, 15.)

“Most certainly, our Lord spoke then of a most remarkable type,” said Mrs. Temple. “To what coming event in his own life did our Saviour refer in the expression ‘be lifted up’?”

“To His being lifted up on the cross,” said Amy, in a low tone of voice.

“And why was the Son of God lifted up on the dreadful cross?” asked her mother.

“That we—that all who believe in Him shall have eternal life,” replied Amy Temple.

“It was indeed as a type of this great salvation from eternal death that the brazen serpent was lifted up by Moses,” said the lady. “Do you remember what had happened to the Israelites to make the raising of the brass serpent needful to save them from destruction brought on by sin?”

As Amy did not immediately reply to the question, Elsie eagerly put in her word.

“You told us all about it last Sunday, mamma; I remember the story quite well. The people had been wicked, very wicked, and so fiery serpents came amongst them and bit them; and many—I don’t know how many—Israelites died, because no doctor knew how to cure them.”

“Were those deadly bites a type of sin whose wages are death?” asked Lucius.

“They were so, my son,” said his mother. “Man had no way of saving those who had received the deadly wound, so God himself showed Moses a way. The Lord bade him lift up on high a serpent of brass, and promised that whoso _looked_ upon it should live.”

“I cannot imagine how mere _looking_ could do the least good to a person dying of the poison of a snake-bite,” observed Agnes.

“The Almighty willed that it should be so,” said Mrs. Temple; “He willed that the look of faith should bring healing to a sick body, as the look of faith at a crucified Saviour still brings healing to the sin-wounded soul. When I read how my Lord says, through the prophet Isaiah, ‘_Look unto Me, and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth_’ (Isaiah xlv. 22), I think of the brazen serpent, and know that I have but to believe in Christ and be saved.”

“What do you mean by the look of faith?” inquired Agnes.

“Faith is simply _believing_,” replied Mrs. Temple. “To look to Christ is to believe that He is able and willing to save us, and that none can save us but He.”

Dora, who had chosen, as we know, to sit a little drawn back from the circle, and with a screen in her hand, now dropped the screen on her lap, and leant forward, so that the red flickering gleam of the fire-light shone on her face as she anxiously asked, “Then are we quite, quite safe, sure never to be punished for anything evil that we have done, if only we have faith that the Lord will save us?”

“Yes, if the faith be _real_, living faith,” replied Mrs. Temple.

“Are there then two kinds of faith?” inquired Lucius.

“Yes,” answered his mother; “we read in the Bible of two kinds of faith or belief—one dead and one living.”

“I cannot understand that at all,” said Amy.

“I will try to explain,” said the lady “and I ask you, my children, to give me your full attention, for this is a matter of the greatest importance. You all believe, do you not, that there is an Emperor of Germany?”

“Yes, yes,” replied the children: and Elsie added with a little nod, “I believe there is such a man, though I never have seen him.”

“Now does your belief in the existence of the Emperor—that is, your _faith_ in it—does it make the smallest difference in your actions, or words, or feelings?” inquired Mrs. Temple.

“No, why should it?” cried Lucius.

“The Emperor does not care for us; he knows nothing about us,” said Elsie.

“Then your faith in the Emperor is a _dead_ faith, it has no effect on your hearts,” observed Mrs. Temple. “And this is the kind of faith which many persons, alas! have in the Lord. They believe in a careless sort of way that Christ once lived in the world, and died on the cross, but they believe only with the head, not with the heart. And this is _dead_ faith, a kind of faith which never can save us.”

“But what is _living_ faith, then?” asked Amy.

“When our belief makes us really love Him who first loved us,—when the thought of Christ’s dying for sin makes us hate sin, that cost Him so dear, then our faith must be living faith; and thus looking to the Lord we are saved.”

Dora sighed and drew her head back again into the shadow. Hers was not a faith that had kept her from sin—hers was not a faith that made her now obey the whisper of conscience, confess her fault to her mother, and make what amends she could for what she had done.

“Depend upon it, that when an Israelite had been cured of his wound by looking at the brazen serpent, he did not go and stroke and play with the fiery reptile that had bitten him,” observed Lucius, who had the clearest head amongst the party, and best entered into the meaning of types.

“No, he would run away from the horrid creatures, or try to kill them; he would put his foot upon the fiery serpents and crush them—crush them,” cried Elsie, stamping her little foot on the hearthrug, to add force to her words.

“So every one who has living faith dreads and hates sin, and tries to destroy it,” observed Mrs. Temple. “We will not carelessly trifle with it _if we believe from our hearts_ that our blessed Redeemer suffered because of our sins.”

“What a very holy thing was that brazen serpent which Moses set up on a pole!” exclaimed Amy. “Did he not afterwards put it into the ark, that the Israelites might carry it about with them wherever they went, and treasure it as they did the tables of stone on which the Commandments were written?”

“We do not read of Moses putting the brazen serpent into the ark,” replied Mrs. Temple; “but the Israelites must have carried it with them in their wanderings through the desert, and have taken it into the Promised Land, for we read of the brazen serpent being greatly honored by the people more than seven hundred years after it was lifted up.” (1 Kings xviii. 4.)

“It was quite right that the Israelites should honor it very, very much,” cried Elsie, “because the brazen serpent had saved so many people from dying.”

“You mistake, my child,” said her mother. “The brass image had no power in itself to save a single creature from death; it was of no use at all but as a means appointed by God. The brazen serpent was a _type_ of salvation; and when the Jews took to burning incense to the mere type, that is, when they paid to it the honor which is due to God alone, they fell into sin.”

The younger children looked surprised; and Amy murmured, “Then can even a holy thing lead men to do what is wrong?”

“Men do wrong, exceedingly wrong, when they put anything, however holy it may seem in their eyes, in the place of God,” observed Mrs. Temple. “When good king Hezekiah saw that his people were honoring the brazen serpent too much, what do you think that he did?”

“Perhaps he locked it up, so that no one could get at it,” cried little Elsie.

“Hezekiah took a much stronger measure than locking up the image,” said her mother. “The good king broke the brazen serpent into pieces, and called it Nehustan, or a piece of brass, to show both by word and deed that the most holy and interesting relic may lead to the sin of idolatry, if it draw away our thoughts and our hearts from the Lord who alone can give us salvation.”