us all that we know we ought to do, and yet feel hampered and
hindered in performing.

Oh, dear friends! there are many of you, I believe, who have more or
less spasmodically and interruptedly, but with a continual recurrence
to the effort, sought to plant your feet firmly in the paths of
righteousness, and have more or less failed. Listen to this Gospel,
and accept it, and put it to the proof. The love of God which is in
Christ Jesus, and the life which that love brings in its hands, for
all of us who will trust it, will dwell in you if you will, and mould
you into His own likeness, and the law of the spirit of life which
was in Christ Jesus will make us free from the law of sin and death.

All noble living is a battle. Can you and I, with our ten thousand,
meet him that cometh against us with his twenty, the temptations of
the world and of its Prince? Send for the reinforcements, and Jesus
Christ will come and teach your hands to war and your fingers to
fight. All noble life is self-denial, coercion, restraint; and can my
poor, feeble hands apply muscular force enough to the brake to keep
the wheels clogged, and prevent them from whirling me downhill into
ruin? Let Him come and put His great gentle hand on the top of yours,
and that will enable you to scotch the wheels, and make self-denial
possible. All noble life is a building up by slow degrees from the
foundation. And can you and I complete the task with our own limited
resources, and our own feeble strengths? Will not 'all that pass by
begin to mock' us and say, 'This man began to build and was not able
to finish'? That is the epitaph written over all moralities and over
all lives which, catching some glimpse of the good and the true and
the noble, have tried, apart from Christ, to reproduce them in
themselves. Frightful gaps, and an unfinished, however fair structure
end them all. Go to Him. 'His hand hath laid the foundation of the
house, His hand shall also finish it.' He who is Himself the
foundation-stone is also the headstone of the corner, which is
brought forth with shouting of 'Grace! Grace unto it!'

I need not, I suppose, linger to remind you what important and large
lessons these thoughts carry, not only for men who are trying to work
at the task of mending and making their own characters, but on the
larger scale, for all who seek to benefit and elevate their fellows.
Brethren, it is not for me to depreciate any workers who, in any
department, and