on his nose. And yet on precisely such a consideration is built the whole doctrine about the sanctification through faith. Here is the discussion:
“197. Divine grace, which achieves our sanctification, indeed extends over all men, but does not act upon them against their will, and in fact sanctifies a sinner, and thereupon saves him, only when certain conditions are observed on his part. The first of these is faith.”
This unexpected introduction into the discussion of the idea of faith is particularly remarkable because all those dogmas which have been disclosed to us heretofore, beginning with the concept of God, were nothing but truths of faith. Up till now there has not once been any mention made about faith and there has not been any definition of what is to be understood by the word “faith.”
Heretofore it was assumed that faith was that correct knowledge of God, as indeed the Eastern Patriarchs say, that correct conception about God, which lies at the foundation of every other knowledge, and that everything else resulted from faith, but there has by no means been given that definition of faith by which it is the action of the human will. Here it turns out to be some kind of an action:
“(1) Under the name of faith in general is understood here the free acceptance and appropriation by man with all the powers of his soul of those truths which it has pleased God to reveal to us in Christ for our salvation. By faith is meant this acceptance and appropriation, because the revealed truths are for the most part incomprehensible to our reason and inaccessible to knowledge, but can be appropriated only through faith.” (p. 298.)
Grace does not act against the will. Men must make an effort of will in order to accept it. Faith is a free acceptance, an appropriation of incomprehensible truths. Involuntarily there arises the question: how does the appropriation take place? Through reason, or through the will? Impossibly through reason, since the truths
