festation of absolute exemption from all the ills
that flesh and spirit are heir to, and radiant investure with all the
good that humanity can put on, which lies beyond the great barrier of
this mortal life. And that complete salvation, in its double aspect, is
obviously the end for which all that guarding of life is lavished upon
us, as it is the end for which all the discipline of life is given to
us, and as it is the end for which the bitter agony and pain of the
Christ on the Cross were freely rendered. But that ultimate and
superlative perfection has its roots and its beginning here. And so in
Scripture you find salvation sometimes regarded as a thing in the past
experience of every Christian man which he received at the very
beginning of his course, and sometimes you have it treated as being
progressive, running on continually through all his days; and sometimes
you have it treated, as in my text, as laid up yonder, and only to be
reached when life is done with. But just a verse or two after my text we
read that the Christian man here, on condition of his loving Jesus
Christ and believing in Him, rejoices because he here and now 'receives
the end of his faith, even the salvation of his soul.' And so there are
the two things--the incipient germ to-day, the full-foliaged
fruit-bearing tree planted in the higher house of the Lord.

These two things are inseparably intertwined. The Christian life in its
imperfection here, the partial salvation of to-day demands, unless the
universe is a chaos and there is no personal God the centre of it, a
future life, in which all that is here tendency shall be realised
possession, and in which all that here but puts up a pale and feeble
shoot above the ground, shall grow and blossom and bear fruit unto life
eternal. 'Like the new moon with a ragged edge, e'en in its
imperfections beautiful,' all the characteristics of Christian life on
earth prophesy that the orb is crescent, and will one day round itself
into its pure silvery completeness. If you see a great wall in some
palace, with slabs of polished marble for most of its length, and here
and there stretches of course rubble shoved in, you would know that that
was not the final condition, that the rubble had to be cased over, or
taken out and replaced by the lucent slab that reflected the light, and
showed, by its reflecting, its own mottled beauty. Thus the very
inconsistencies, the thwarted desires, the broken resolutions, the