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. Negatively,
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 here, and, if there be a hereafter, there, too.
The sickness of soul and the 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. The 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 contor