He abandons us for the moment in despair; let us hear in it the pathetic voice of a Brother who knows all our weaknesses and has felt our emotions; let us hear the voice of sovereign authority which uses its enemies for its purposes, and is never loftier than when it is most lowly, whose cross is His throne of glory, whose exaltation is His deepest humiliation, and let us hear a love which, discerning each of us through all the ages and the crowds, went willingly to the Cross, because He willed that He should be our Saviour.

And, seeing that time is short, and the future pre carious, and delay may darken into loss and rejection, let us take these words as spoken to us in another sense, and hear in them the warning that "to-day, if ye will hear His voice," we harden not our hearts. And when He says to us, in regard of repentance and faith, and Christian consecration and service, "That thou doest, do quickly," let us answer, "I made haste and delayed not, but made haste to keep Thy commandments."

XXX.

Salvation and Destruction continuous

Processes.

"THE preaching of the Cross is to them that perish foolishness, but unto us which are saved it is the power of God."-1 COR. i. 18.

HE starting-point of my remarks now is the observation that a slight variation of rendering, which will be found in the Revised Version, brings out the true meaning of these words. Instead of reading "them that perish" and "us which are saved," we ought to read "them that are perishing," and "us which are being saved." That is to say, the Apostle represents the two contrasted conditions, not so much as fixed states, either present or future, but rather as processes which are going on, and are manifestly, in the present, incomplete. That opens some very solemn and intensely practical considerations.

Then I may further note that this antithesis includes the whole of the persons to whom the Gospel is preached. In one or other of these two classes they all stand. Further, we have to observe that the consideration which determines the class to which

men belong is the attitude which they respectively take to the preaching of the Cross. If it be, and because it is, "foolishness" to some, they belong to the catalogue of the perishing. If it be, and because it is, "the power of God" to others, they belong to the class of those who are in process of being saved.

So, then, we have the ground cleared for two or three very simple, but, as it seems to me, very important thoughts.

I.-I desire, first, to look at the two contrasted conditions, "perishing" and "being saved."

Now we shall best, I think, understand the force of the darker of these two terms if we first ask what is the force of the brighter and more radiant. If we understand what the Apostle means by "saving" and "salvation," we shall understand, also, what he means. by "perishing."

If, then, we turn for a moment to Scripture analogy and teaching, we find that the threadbare word "salvation," which we all take it for granted that we understand, and which, like a well-worn coin, has been so passed from hand to hand that it scarcely remains legible-that well-worn word "salvation" starts from a double metaphorical meaning. It means either, and is used for both, being healed or being made safe. In the one sense it is often employed in the Gospel narratives of our Lord's miracles, and it involves the metaphor of a sick man and his cure. In the other it involves the metaphor of a man in peril and his deliverance and security. The negative side, then, of the Gospel idea of salvation is the making whole from a disease, and the making safe from a danger. Nega

tively, it is the removal, from each of us, of the one sickness, which is sin; and the one danger, which is the reaping of the fruits and consequences of sin, in their variety as guilt, remorse, habit, and slavery under it, perverted relation to God, a fearful apprehension of penal consequences now, and-if there be a hereafter then, too. This sickness of soul and these perils that threaten life flow from the central fact of sin. And salvation consists, negatively, in the sweeping away of all of these, whether the sin itself, or the fatal facility with which we yield to it, or the desolation and perversion which it brings into all the faculties and susceptibilities, or the perversion of relation to God, and the consequent evils, here and hereafter, which throng around the evil-doer. The sick man is healed, and the man in peril is set in safety. But, besides that, there is a great deal more. Our cure is incomplete till the full tide of health follows convalescence. When God saves, He does not only bar up the iron gate, through which the hosts of evil rush out upon the defenceless soul, but He flings wide the golden gate, through which the glad troops of blessings and of graces flock around the delivered spirit, and enrich it with all joys and with all beauties. So the positive side of salvation is the investiture of the saved man with throbbing health through all his veins, and the strength that comes from a divine life. It is the bestowal upon the delivered man of everything that he needs for blessedness and for duty. All good conferred, and every evil banned back into its dark den, such is the Christian conception of salvation. It is much that the negative should be accomplished, but it is little in comparison with the rich fulness of

positive endowments, of happiness, and of holiness which make an integral part of the salvation of God.

This, then, being the one side, what about the other? If this be salvation, its precise opposite is the Scriptural idea of "perishing." Utter ruin lies in the word, the entire failure to be what God meant a man to be. That is in it, and no contortions of arbitrary interpretation can take that solemn significance out of the dreadful expression. If salvation be the cure of the sickness, perishing is the fatal end of the unchecked disease. If salvation be the deliverance from the outstretched claws of the harpy evils that crowd about the trembling soul, then perishing is the fixing of their poisoned talons into their prey, and their rending of it into fragments.

Of course that is metaphor, but no metaphor can be half so dreadful as the plain, prosaic fact that the exact opposite of the salvation, which consists in the healing from sin, and the deliverance from danger, and in the endowment with all gifts good and beautiful, is the Christian idea of the alternative "perishing." Then, it means the disease running its course. It means the dangers laying hold of the man in peril. It means the withdrawal, or the non-bestowal, of all which is good, whether it be good of holiness or good of happiness. It does not mean, as it seems to me, the cessation of conscious existence, any more than salvation means the bestowal of conscious existence. But he who perishes knows that he has perished, even as he knows himself while he is in the process of perishing. Therefore, we have to think of the gradual fading away from consciousness and dying out of a life, of many things beautiful and sweet and gracious,