Faith is a theological expression; we are apt to forget that it has any other than a theological import; yet it is the commonest principle of man’s daily life, called in that region prudence, enterprise, or some such name.  It is in effect the principle on which alone any human superiority can be gained.  Faith, in religion, is the same principle as faith in worldly matters, differing only in its object:  it rises through successive stages.  When, in reliance upon your promise, your child gives up the half-hour’s idleness of to-day for the holiday of to-morrow, he lives by faith; a future supersedes the present pleasure.  When he abstains from over-indulgence of the appetite, in reliance upon your word that the result will be pain and sickness, sacrificing the present pleasure for fear of future punishment, he acts on faith:  I do not say that this is a high exercise of faith—­it is a very low one—­but it is faith.

Once more:  the same motive of action may be carried on into manhood; in our own times two religious principles have been exemplified in the subjugation of a vice.  The habit of intoxication has been broken by an appeal to the principle of combination, and the principle of belief.  Men were taught to feel that they were not solitary stragglers against the vice; they were enrolled in a mighty army, identified in principles and interests.  Here was the principle of the Church—­association for reciprocated strength; they were thus taught the inevitable result of the indulgence of the vice.  The missionaries of temperance went through the country contrasting the wretchedness and the degradation and the filth of drunkenness with the domestic comfort, and the health, and the regular employment of those who were masters of themselves.  So far as men believed this, and gave up the tyranny of the present for the hope of the future—­so far they lived by faith.

Brethren, I do not say that this was a high triumph for the principle of faith; it was in fact, little more than selfishness; it was a high future balanced against a low present; only the preference of a future and higher physical enjoyment to a mean and lower one.  Yet still to be ruled by this influence raises a man in the scale of being:  it is a low virtue, prudence, a form of selfishness; yet prudence is a virtue.  The merchant, who forecasts, saves, denies himself systematically through years, to amass a fortune, is not a very lofty being, yet he is higher, as a man, than he who is sunk in mere bodily gratifications.  You would not say that the intemperate man—­who has become temperate in order, merely to gain by that temperance honour and happiness—­is a great man, but you would say he was a higher and a better man than he who is enslaved by his passions, or than the gambler who improvidently stakes all upon a moment’s throw.  The worldly mother who plans for the advancement of a family, and sacrifices solid enjoyments