rise again combative and undaunted
after a hundred falls, escape from the grip of lusts and revenges, make
head against despair, thrust back the very onset of madness. He is still
the same man he was before he came to God, still with his libidinous,
vindictive, boastful, or indolent vein; but now his will to prevail
over those qualities can refer to an exterior standard and an external
interest, he can draw upon a strength, almost boundless, beyond his own.

5. BELIEVE, AND YOU ARE SAVED

But be a sin great or small, it cannot damn a man once he has found God.
You may kill and hang for it, you may rob or rape; the moment you truly
repent and set yourself to such atonement and reparation as is possible
there remains no barrier between you and God. Directly you cease to hide
or deny or escape, and turn manfully towards the consequences and the
setting of things right, you take hold again of the hand of God. Though
you sin seventy times seven times, God will still forgive the poor rest
of you. Nothing but utter blindness of the spirit can shut a man off
from God.

There is nothing one can suffer, no situation so unfortunate, that it
can shut off one who has the thought of God, from God. If you but lift
up your head for a moment out of a stormy chaos of madness and cry to
him, God is there, God will not fail you. A convicted criminal, frankly
penitent, and neither obdurate nor abject, whatever the evil of his
yesterdays, may still die well and bravely on the gallows to the glory
of God. He may step straight from that death into the immortal being of
God.

This persuasion is the very essence of the religion of the true God.
There is no sin, no state that, being regretted and repented of, can
stand between God and man.

CHAPTER THE SEVENTH

THE IDEA OF A CHURCH

1. THE WORLD DAWN

As yet those who may be counted as belonging definitely to the new
religion are few and scattered and unconfessed, their realisations
are still uncertain and incomplete. But that is no augury for the
continuance of this state of affairs even for the next few decades.
There are many signs that the revival is coming very swiftly, it may be
coming as swiftly as the morning comes after a tropical night. It may
seem at present as though nothing very much were happening, except for
the fact that the old familiar constellations of theology have become
a little pallid and lost something of their multitude of points. But
nothing f