ST. PETER’S, NOTTING-HI LL.—A second visit to this church enabled us to hear a sermon preached by the respected Vicar himself, the Rev. John Robbins, D.D. The text was taken from 2 Tim. i. 12: ‘For I know whom I have believed.’ The subject of the discourse was _Faith_; and after a brief _exordium_, illustrating that faith was man’s own act under the influence of Divine grace, and improved by the exercise of a man’s own faculties, the preacher proceeded to show that when God commands us to believe, and when he is pleased to make our faith a condition of salvation, it would seem that faith cannot be “some magical and arbitrary something which suddenly falls into the soul,” but a thing which in some measure depends on ourselves. Faith, in all its stages and degrees, “always” depended on the _will_. The principle was illustrated by the experience of two persons starting in life, each having a certain faith in justice and honesty derived from early education—the one yields to the temptations of evil, and the other resists, the result being that the first loses all faith, whilst the other grows in it to perfection—retaining “the moral ideal and will” to a “high and happy development.” Each of these characters is responsible for the degree of his faith, that “depending on the action of his own will.” Faith, then, was strengthened by fidelity; and he would say to them, “Live for holiness, truth, justice, the good, the beautiful, the true, and then they would surely believe that they were not mere cold abstractions of theology, but the most real of all things! Let them now go to the very core of religious faith. If the Gospel told them to believe in Jesus Christ, was it not that Jesus Christ is truth, was holiness, love, living and incarnate? The more they followed him the more they would believe in him. For instance, there is one who as yet sees in Jesus a mere man, but his doctrine attracts and seems of a beauty incomparable. He would not like to pass for a man without faith, yet when he analysed his faith he found that it reduced itself to a mere belief in Christ’s moral teaching. That was very little, said some of them. But he was not one to despise little beginnings. Let him act up to his faith, and strive to conform his own life to the sublimity of Christ’s morality, and keep that object courageously and unflinchingly in view, and he would not need to continue this long before he would be forced to admit that he was very far from his end, and that the holiness of Christ’s life completely and utterly transcends the natural strength of mere humanity. It would not then require a great effort in him to believe that the Scripture speaks truly when it speaks of the fall of man and the slavery of sin. He would defy him to examine his state long before a voice from the depths of his own heart told him that he too needed pardon. Following this it would bring him to the foot of the cross, and then, casting a glance of holy self-abnegation (which was faith in her truest aspect), he would gratefully adore the divine wisdom which was able to reconcile on the cross, justice and mercy; and, ravished by a pardon which alone could satisfy the conscience, he would rise the redeemed of the Lord, and able to say with St. Paul, ‘I know in whom I have believed.’” After some further discriminating views as to the possible variations in human experience in the attainment of saving faith, the preacher concluded with a pointed application of the truth to his hearers, the sermon lasting about forty minutes. As a preacher, Dr. Robbins is earnest and intelligent. He uses his MS., but does so freely, without apparently being trammelled by it. As we before remarked upon his excellent reading of the Scriptures, we can now record a similar view of his pulpit work. His manner is natural and impressive, and his style fresh; whilst there is evident painstaking to think out a subject for his audience, and to enable them to follow him along the course of his argument. His congregation is large, and, in appearance, of the more wealthy and educated classes; and his mode of teaching the experience of true faith as above was probably an adaptation to the mental habitude and circumstances of his hearers. We can conceive a different class of audience whom Dr. Robbins would soon discover to require quite another way of putting the process of religious experience. But it is surely a great part of the wisdom of the Christian teacher to find out the readiest line by which those to whom he is ministering can be led to Christ. Yet, the impression is probably correct that the Rev. Doctor is in theology of the “Broad Church School.”