lasting fitness of things. There are words that belong to hours or even
moments, words that win their meaning from the newly created situation. But
faith is not such a word. It stands for something inclusive and imperial.
It is one of the few timeless words in earth's vocabulary. For the deep
roots of it and the wide range of it there is nothing like unto it in the
whole sweep of things spiritual. So the 'all times' trust is not for one
moment to be regarded as some supreme degree of faith unto which one here
and there may attain and which the rest can well afford to look upon as a
counsel of perfection. This exhortation to trust in God at all times
concerns first of all the _nature_ of faith and not the _measure_ of it.
All real faith has the note of the eternal in it. It can meet the present
because it is not of the present. We have grown familiar with the phrase,
'The man of the moment.' But who is this man? Sometimes he is very
literally a man of the moment--an opportunist, a gambler with the hours, a
follower of the main chance. The moment makes him, and passing away unmakes
him. But the true man of the moment is the man to whom the moment is but
one throb in the pulse of eternity. For him the moment does not stand out
in splendid isolation. It is set in its place between that which hath been
and that which shall be. And its true significance is not something abiding
in it, but something running through it. So is it in this great matter of
faith. Only the faith that can trust at all times can trust at any time.
The moment that faith heeds the dictation of circumstance it ceases to be
faith and becomes calculation. All faith is transcendent. It is independent
of the conditions in which it has to live. It is not snared in the strange
web of the tentative and the experimental. He that has for one moment felt
the power of faith has got beyond the dominion of time.

_Trust in Him at all times._ That is the only real escape from confusion
and contradiction in the judgements we are compelled to pass upon life.
Times change so suddenly and inexplicably. The hours seem to be at strife