James introduces an imaginary speaker, who replies to the man who says that he has faith. This new interlocutor says' his say too. But he is not objecting, as has been sometimes thought, to James, but to the first speaker, and he is expressing James's own thought, which the Apostle does not utter in his own person, perhaps because he would avoid the appearance of boasting of his own deeds. To take this speaker as opposing James brings hopeless confusion. What does the new speaker say? He takes up the first one's assertion of having faith'; he will not say that he himself has it, but he challenges the other man to show his, if he can, by any other way than by exhibiting the fruits of faith, while he himself is prepared and content to be tested by the same test. That is to say, talk does not prove the possession of faith; the only possible demonstration that one has it is deeds, which are its fruits. If a man has (true) faith, it will mould his conduct. If he has nothing to produce but his bare assertion, then he cannot show it at all; and if no evidence of its existence is forthcoming, it does not exist.
Motion is the test of life. A faith' which does nothing, which moves no limb, is a corpse. On the other hand, if grapes grow ruddy and sweet in their clusters, there must be a vine on which they grow, though its stem and root may be unseen. What is bred in the bone will come out in the flesh.' True faith will be fruitful. Is not this Paul's doctrine too? Does not he speak of faith that worketh by love ?' Is it not his principle, too, that faith is the source of conduct, the active principle of the Christian life, and that if there are no results of it in the life, there is none of it in the heart ?
But the second speaker has a sharp dart of irony in his quiver (James 2:13). You plume yourself on your monotheistic creed, do you, and you think that that is enough to make you a child of God's? Well, that is good, as far as it goes, but it does not go very far. You have companions in it, for the demons believe it still more thoroughly than you do; and, what is more, it produces more effect on them than on you. You do nothing in consequence of your belief; they "shudder,"at any rate--a grim result, but one showing that their belief goes deeper than yours.' The arrow gains in point and keenness if we observe that James quotes the very words which are contained in the great profession of monotheism which was recited morning and evening by every Jew (Deut. 6:4, etc.). James seems, in James 2:20, to speak again in his own name, and to reassert his main thought as enforced by this second argument.
