dwindling: 'Now,' as moment after moment ticks itself into
the past, 'now is our salvation nearer than when we believed.'
Children, when they are getting near their holidays, take strips of
paper, and tear off a piece as each day passes. And as we tear off
the days let us feel that we are drawing closer to our home, and that
the blessedness laid up for us in it is drawing nearer to us. 'Our
salvation,' not our destruction, our fuller life, not in any true
sense of the word our 'death,' is 'nearer than when we believed.'

But some one may say, 'Is a man not saved till after he is dead?' Is
salvation future, not coming till after the grave? No, certainly not.
There are three aspects of that word in Scripture. Sometimes the New
Testament writers treat salvation as past, and represent a Christian
as being invested with the possession of it all at the very moment of
his first faith. That is true, that whatever is yet to be evolved
from what is given to the poorest and foulest sinner, in the moment
of his initial faith in Christ, there is nothing to be added to it.
The salvation which the penitent thief received on the cross is all
the salvation that he was ever to get. But out of it there came
welling and welling and welling, when he had passed into the region
'where beyond these voices there is peace'--there came welling out
from that inexhaustible fountain which was opened in him all the
fullnesses of an eternal progress in the heavens. And so it is with
us. Salvation is a past gift which we received when we believed.

But in another aspect, which is also emphatically stated in
Scripture, it is a progressive process, and not merely a gift
bestowed once for all in the past. I do not dwell upon that thought,
but just remind you of a turn of expression which occurs in various
connections more than once. 'The Lord added to the Church daily such
as were being saved,' says Luke. Still more emphatically in the
Epistle to the Corinthians, the Apostle puts into antithesis the two
progressive processes, and speaks of the Gospel as being preached,
and being a savour of life unto life 'to them that are being saved,'
and a savour of destruction 'to them that are being lost.' No moral
or spiritual condition is stereotyped or stagnant. It is all
progressive. And so the salvation that is given once for all is ever
being unfolded, and the Christian life on earth is the unfolding of
it.

But in another aspect still, such as is presented