ent' if the Atonement does not make you live the Christ
life? And what is the good of all your orthodoxy unless the orthodoxy of
creed issues in orthopraxy of conduct? There are far too many of us who
half-consciously do still hold by the notion that if a man believes
rightly then that makes him a Christian. My text shatters to pieces any
such conception. You are saved that you may be good, and do good
continually; and unless you are so doing you may be steeped to the
eyebrows in the correctest of creeds, and it will only drown you.

Contrast this conception of the purpose of Christianity with the far too
common notion that we are saved, mainly in order that we may indulge in
devout emotions, and in the outgoing of affection and confidence to
Jesus Christ. Emotional Christianity is necessary, but Christianity,
which is mainly or exclusively emotional, lives next door to hypocrisy,
and there is a door of communication between them. For there is nothing
more certain and more often illustrated in experience than that there is
a strange underground connection between a Christianity which is mainly
fervid and a very shady life. One sees it over and over again. And the
cure of that is to apprehend the great truth of my text, that we are
saved, not in order that we may know aright, nor in order that we may
feel aright, but in order that we may be good and do 'good works.' In
the order of things, right thought touches the springs of right feeling,
and right feeling sets going the wheels of right action. Do not let the
steam all go roaring out of the waste-pipe in however sacred and blessed
emotions. See that it is guided so as to drive the spindles and the
shuttles and make the web.

III. And now, lastly, and only a word--here we have the field provided
for the exercise of the 'good works.'

'Created unto good works which God has before prepared'--before the
re-creation--'that we should walk in them.' That is to say, the true way
to look at the life is to regard it as the exercising-ground which God
has prepared for the development of the life that, through Christ, is
implanted in us. He cuts the channels that the stream may flow. That is
the way to look at tasks, at difficulties. Difficulty is the parent of
power, and God arranges our circumstances in order that, by wrestling
with obstacles, we may gain the 'thews that throw the world,' and in
order that in sorrows and in joys, in the rough places and the smooth,
we may find