n men repent of
their sin, as the process was called, when I have had no faith in it
whatever. They were not repenting of their sin, but lamenting the cost
of its indulgence.

We must do more than cease to do evil things only because evil has its
price; we must learn to do well by learning to love all that is meant
by well. There is no escape from evil except through love of good.
The Christian salvation, which means the saving of the whole self-hood
of man, is a positive thing from its inception into its endless
development. Where it is repression it is that there may be
expression. This, I imagine, is what Robert L. Stevenson must have
meant when he said "We are not damned for doing wrong, but for not
doing right." Christ, he contends, "would never hear of negative
morality; 'thou shalt' was ever His word, with which He superseded,
'thou shalt not.'" According to Stevenson--I do not say he is right,
but I do quote his words as worth attention--we are not damned so much
for yielding to evil, as for not getting into our life its oppositive
virtue; some content vital enough to cast out the evil, and to keep it
out. To go on fighting some besetting sin is only to repeat, for the
most part, an experience many of us know but too well. It almost
invariably ends one way. In weariness and despair we ask: "Why should
we war with evil? It is more than our test, it is our fate; let us
take what sweet we can before it becomes all bitter." Which is but
another way of saying: "Evil, be thou my good."

Mark well, then, our next step. It is not enough to tell us that we
must conquer the wrong by doing the right. The question is this: Is
there any power, anything in what is called saving grace, which is
adequate to the struggle on our part, and which appropriated can make
us, to use the Apostle's description, "more than conquerors"?

There is; and I will try, first, to tell you what it is, and, secondly,
how we may realize it. It is--call it by what name we may for the
moment--that which casts out the mean, the ignoble, and the selfish, by
filling out life with the great, the noble, and the unselfish. It is,
in a word, the salvation which means the "highest character and
blessedness, which we, individually and collectively, are capable of
reaching and realizing." Let us, then, call it what it is--the power
of God unto salvation. And how are we to get it into our possession?
The answer is, it needs no getting in. Po