u for. That is why you are saved, says Paul. Instead of working
upwards from works to salvation, take your stand at the received
salvation, and understand what it is for, and work downwards from it.

Now, do not let us take that phrase, 'good works,' which I have already
said came hot from the Apostle's heart, and is now cold as a bar of
iron, in the limited sense which it has come to bear in modern religious
phraseology. It means something a great deal more than that. It covers
the whole ground of what the Apostle, in another of his letters, speaks
of when he says, 'Whatsoever things are lovely and of good report, if
there be any virtue'--to use for a moment the world's word, which has
such power to conjure in Greek ethics--'or if there be any praise'--to
use for a moment the world's low motive, which has such power to sway
men--'think of these things,' and these things do. That is the width of
the conception of 'good works'; everything that is 'lovely and of good
report.' That is what you receive the new life for.

Contrast that with other notions of the purpose of revelation and
redemption. Contrast it with what I have already referred to, and so
need not enlarge upon now, the miserably inadequate and low notions of
the essentials of salvation which one hears perpetually, and which many
of us cherish. It is no mere immunity from a future hell. It is no mere
entrance into a vague heaven. It is not escaping the penalty of the
inexorable law, 'Whatsoever a man soweth that shall he also reap,' that
is meant by 'salvation,' any more than it is putting away the rod, which
the child would be all the better for having administered to him, that
is meant by 'forgiveness.' But just as forgiveness, in its essence,
means not suspension nor abolition of penalty, but the uninterrupted
flow of the Father's love, so salvation in its essence means, not the
deliverance from any external evil or the alteration of anything in the
external position, but the revolution and the re-creation of the man's
nature. And the purpose of it is that the saved man may live in
conformity with the will of God, and that on his character there may be
embroidered all the fair things which God desires to see on His child's
vesture.

Contrast it with the notion that an orthodox belief is the purpose of
revelation. I remember hearing once of a man that 'he was a very shady
character, but sound on the Atonement.' What is the use of being 'sound
on the Atonem