heir stabs thickening, the
farther he travels, and the nearer he draws to the face and eyes of God.
But there is a way out. It is the way of self-knowledge and confession.
This is the point upon which all the antecedents of salvation hinge. He
who has come to know, with a clear discrimination, that he is in a guilty
bondage to his own inclination and lust, has taken the very first step
towards freedom. For, the Redeemer, the Almighty Deliverer, is near the
captive, so soon as the captive feels his bondage and confesses it. The
mighty God walking upon the waves of this sinful, troubled life,
stretches out _His_ arm, the very instant any sinking soul cries, "Lord
save me." And unless that appeal and confession of helplessness _is_
made, He, the Merciful and the Compassionate, will let the soul go
down before His own eyes to the unfathomed abyss. If the sinking Peter
had not uttered that cry, the mighty hand of Christ would not have been
stretched forth. All the difficulties disappear, so soon as a man
understands the truth of the Divine affirmation: "O Israel thou hast
destroyed thyself,"--it is a real destruction, and it is thy own
work,--"but in ME is thy help."

[Footnote 1: MILTON: Samson Agonistes, 832-834.--One key to the solution
of the problem, how there can be bondage in the very seat of
freedom,--how man can be responsible for sin, yet helpless in
it,--is to be found in this fact of a reflex action of the will upon
itself, or, a reaction of self-action. Philosophical speculation upon
the nature of the human will has not, hitherto, taken this fact
sufficiently into account. The following extracts corroborate the view
presented above. "My _will_ the enemy held, and _thence_ had made a
chain for me, and bound me. For, of a perverse _will_ comes _lust_; and a
lust yielded to becomes _custom_; and custom not resisted becomes
_necessity_. By which links, as it were, joined together as in a chain, a
hard bondage held me enthralled." AUGUSTINE: Confessions, VIII. v. 10.
"Every degree of inclination contrary to duty, which is and must be
sinful, implies and involves an equal degree of difficulty and inability
to obey. For, indeed, such inclination of the heart to disobey, and the
difficulty or inability to obey, are precisely one and the same. This
kind of difficulty or inability, therefore, always is great according
to the strength and fixedness of the inclination to disobey; and it
becomes _total_ and _absolute_ [ina