ate conception of Christianity, and of the
gifts which it bestows, and the blessings which it intends for men, when
it is limited, as it practically is, by a large number--I might almost
say the majority--of professing Christians to a simple means of altering
their relation to the past, and to the broken law of God and of
righteousness. Thanks be to His name! His great gift to the world begins
in each individual case with the assurance that all the past is
cancelled. He gives that blessed sense of forgiveness, which can never
be too highly estimated unless it is forced out of its true place as the
introduction, and made to be the climax and the end, of His gifts. I do
not know what Christianity means, unless it means that you and I are
forgiven for a purpose; that the purpose, if I may so say, is something
in advance of the means towards the purpose, the purpose being that we
should be filled with all the strength and righteousness and
supernatural life granted to us by the Spirit of God.

It is well that we should enter into the vestibule. There is no other
path to the throne but through the vestibule. But do not let us forget
that the good news of forgiveness, though we need it day by day, and
need it perpetually repeated, is but the introduction to and porch of
the Temple, and that beyond it there towers, if I cannot say a loftier,
yet I may say a further gift, even the gift of a divine life like His,
from whom it comes, and of which it is in reality an effluence and a
spark. The true characteristic blessing of the Gospel is the gift of a
new power to a sinful weak world; a power which makes the feeble strong,
and the strongest as an angel of God.

Oh, brethren! we who know how, 'if any power we have, it is to ill'; we
who understand the weakness, the unaptness of our spirits to any good,
and our strength for every vagrant evil that comes upon them to tempt
them, should surely recognise as a Gospel in very deed that which
proclaims to us that the 'everlasting God, the Lord, the Creator of the
ends of the earth,' who Himself 'fainteth not, neither is weary.' hath
yet a loftier display of His strength-giving power than that which is
visible in the heavens above, where, 'because He is strong in might not
one faileth.' That heaven, the region of calm completeness, of law
unbroken and therefore of power undiminished, affords a lesser and
dimmer manifestation of His strength than the work that is done in the
hell of a hum