my sins and prevent them
from scourging me. It is only God who can bestow upon my death a new
life, which shall grow up into righteousness and beauty,
caught of, and kindred to, His own. But if this be the aim of the
Gospel, then its diagnosis of man's sickness is a very much graver
one than that which finds favour amongst so many of us now. Salvation
is a bigger word than any of the little gospels that we hear
clamouring round about us are able to utter. It means something a
great deal more than either social or intellectual, or still more,
material or political betterment of man's condition. The disease lies
so deep, and so great are the destruction and loss partly
experienced, and still more awfully impending over every soul of us,
that something else than tinkering at the outsides, or dealing, as
self-culture does, with man's understanding or, as social gospels do,
with man's economical and civic condition, should be brought to bear.
Dear brethren, especially you Christian ministers, preach a social
Christianity by all means, an applied Christianity, for there does
lie in the Gospel of Jesus Christ a key to all the problems that
afflict our social condition. But be sure first that there is a
Christianity before you talk about applying it. And remember that the
process of salvation begins in the deep heart of the individual and
transforms him first and foremost. The power is 'to every one that
believeth.' It is power in its most universal sweep. Rome's Empire
was wellnigh ubiquitous, but, blessed be God, the dove of Christ
flies farther than the Roman eagle with beak and claw ready for
rapine, and wherever there are men here is a Gospel for them. The
limitation is no limitation of its universality. It is no limitation
of the claim of a medicine to be a panacea that it will only do good
to the man who swallows it. And that is the only limitation of which
the Gospel is susceptible, for we have all the same deep needs, the
same longings; we are fed by the same bread, we are nourished by the
same draughts of water, we breathe the same air, we have the same
sins, and, thanks be to God, we have the same Saviour. 'The power of
God unto salvation to every one that believeth.'

Now before I pass from this part of my subject there is only one
thing more that I want to say, and that is, that you cannot apply
that glowing language about 'the power of God unto salvation' to
anything but the Gospel that Paul preached. Forms of Ch