, if we notice, on the other
side--what are the things which the New Testament sets forth as the
opposites of its salvation? Take, again, a brief reference to Scripture
words: 'The Son of Man came _not to condemn_ the world, but that the
world through Him might be saved.' So the antithesis is between judgment
or condemnation on the one hand, and salvation on the other. That
suggests thoughts substantially identical with the preceding but still
more solemn, as bringing in the prospect a tribunal and a judge. The
Gospel then reveals the Mighty Power that lifts itself between us and
judgment, the Mighty Power that intervenes to prevent absolute
destruction, the Power which saves from sin, from wrath, from death.

Along with them we may take the other thought, that salvation, as the
New Testament understands it, is not only the rescue and deliverance of
a man from evils conceived to lie round about him, and to threaten his
being from without, but that it is his healing from evils which have so
wrought themselves into his very being, and infected his whole nature,
as that the emblem for them is a sickness unto death for the healing
from which this mighty Physician comes. These are the negative sides of
this great Christian thought.

But the New Testament salvation is more than a shelter, more than an
escape. It not only trammels up evil possibilities, and prevents them
from falling upon men's heads, but it introduces all good. It not only
strips off the poisoned robe, but it invests with a royal garb. It is
not only negatively the withdrawal from the power, and the setting above
the reach, of all evil, in the widest sense of that word, physical and
moral, but it is the endowment with every good, in the widest sense of
that word, physical and moral, which man is capable of receiving, or God
has wealth to bestow. And this positive significance of the Christian
salvation, which includes not only pardon, and favour, and purity, and
blessedness here in germ, and sure and certain hope of an overwhelming
glory hereafter--this is all suggested to us by the fact that in
Scripture, more than once, to 'have everlasting life,' and to 'enter
into the Kingdom of God,' are employed as equivalent and alternative
expressions for being saved with the salvation of God.

And that leads me to another point--my text, as those of you who have
used the Revised Version will observe, is there slightly modified in
translation, and reads 'Ye _have be