estroy in what shall then be all God's
holy mountain.

Such is, in the most general terms, the statement of what Christ does
'for us'; and the question comes to be the all-important one for
each, Do I let Him do it for me? Remember the alternative. There must
either be condemnation for us, or for the sin that dwelleth in us.
There is no condemnation for them who are in Christ Jesus, because
there is condemnation for the sin that dwells in them. It must he
slain, or it will slay us. It must be cast out, or it will cast us
out from God. It must be separated from us, or it will separate us
from Him. We need not be condemned, but if it be not condemned, then
we shall be.

THE WITNESS OF THE SPIRIT

'The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit,
that we are the children of God.'--ROMANS viii. 18.

The sin of the world is a false confidence, a careless, complacent
taking for granted that a man is a Christian when he is not. The
fault, and sorrow, and weakness of the Church is a false diffidence,
an anxious fear whether a man be a Christian when he is. There are
none so far away from false confidence as those who tremble lest they
be cherishing it. There are none so inextricably caught in its toils
as those who are all unconscious of _its_ existence and of _their_
danger. The two things, the false confidence and the false
diffidence, are perhaps more akin to one another than they look at
first sight. Their opposites, at all events--the true confidence,
which is faith in Christ; and the true diffidence, which is utter
distrust of myself--are identical. But there may sometimes be, and
there often is, the combination of a real confidence and a false
diffidence, the presence of faith, and the doubt whether it be
present. Many Christians go through life with this as the prevailing
temper of their minds--a doubt sometimes arising almost to agony, and
sometimes dying down into passive patient acceptance of the condition
as inevitable--a doubt whether, after all, they be not, as they say,
'deceiving themselves'; and in the perverse ingenuity with which that
state of mind is constantly marked, they manage to distil for
themselves a bitter vinegar of self-accusation out of grand words in
the Bible, that were meant to afford them but the wine of gladness
and of consolation.

Now this great text which I have ventured to take--not with the idea
that I can exalt it or say anything worthy of it, but simply in the
h