lifted out of the sunny waves which opened its fronds and
brightened its delicate colours, it has become dry and hard and sapless
and dim. But let me try for one moment to freshen it for our conceptions
and our hearts. Salvation has in it the double idea of being made safe,
and being made sound. Peril threatening to slay, and sickness unto
death, are the implications of the conditions which this great word
presupposes. The man that needs to be saved needs to be rescued from
peril and needs to be healed of a disease. And if you do not know and
feel that that is _you_, then you have not learned the first letters of
the alphabet which are necessary to spell 'salvation.' You, I, every
man, we are all sick unto death, because the poison of self-will and sin
is running hot through all our veins, and we are all in deadly peril
because of that poison-peril of death, peril arising from the weight of
guilt that presses upon us, peril from our inevitable collision with the
Divine law and government which make for righteousness.

And so salvation means, negatively, the deliverance from all the evils,
whether they be evils of sorrow or evils of sin, which can affect a man,
and which do affect us all in some measure. But it means far more than
that, for God's salvation is no half-and-half thing, contented, as some
benevolent man might be, in a widespread flood or disaster, with
rescuing the victims and putting them high up enough for the water not
to reach them, and leaving them there shivering cold and starving. But
when God begins by taking away evils, it is in order that He may clear a
path for flooding us with good. And so salvation is not merely what some
of you think it is, the escape from a hell, nor only what some of you
more nobly take it to be, a deliverance from the power of sin in your
hearts; but it is the investiture of each of us with every good and
glory, whether of happiness or of purity, which it is possible for a man
to receive and for God to give. It is the great word of the New
Testament, and they do a very questionable service to humanity who
weaken the grandeur and the greatness of the Scriptural conception of
salvation, by weakening the darkness and the terribleness of the
Scriptural conception of the dangers and the sicknesses from which it
delivers.

But, then, there is another point that I would suggest raised by the
words of my text in their connection. Peter is here evidently speaking
about a future mani