, as physiologists say, a ferment. It is intended to come into
life, and into character, and into the inmost spirit of a man, and grip
them, and mould them, and transform them, and animate them, and impel
them. The truth is to be 'obeyed.'

Now that altogether throws over two card-castles which imperfect
Christians are very apt to build. One which haunted the thoughts of an
earlier generation of Christians more than it does the present, is that
we have done all that 'the truth' asks of us when we have intellectually
endorsed it. And so you get churches which build their membership upon
acceptance of a creed and excommunicate heretics, whilst they keep
do-nothing and uncleansed Christians within their pale. But God does not
tell us anything that we may know. He tells us in order that, knowing,
we may be and do. And right actions, or rather a character which
produces such, is the last aim of all knowledge, and especially of all
moral and religious truth. So 'the truth' is not 'argon', it is a
ferment. And if men, steeped to the eyebrows in orthodoxy, think that
they have done enough when they have set their hands to a confession of
faith, and that they are Christians because they can say, 'all this I
steadfastly believe,' they need to remember that religious truth which
does not mould and transform character and conduct is a king dethroned;
and for dethroned kings there is a short step between the throne from
which they have descended and the scaffold on which they die.

But there is another--what I venture to call a card-castle, which more
of us build in these days of indifference as to creed--and that is that
a great many of us are too much disposed to believe that 'the truth as
it is in Jesus' has received from us all which it expects when we trust
to it for what we call our 'salvation,' meaning thereby forgiveness of
sins and immunity from punishment. These are elements of salvation
unquestionably, but they are only part of it. And the very truths on
which Christian people rest for this initial salvation, which is
forgiveness and acceptance, are meant to be the guides of our lives and
the patterns for our imitation. Why, in this very letter, in reference
to the very parts of Christ's work, on which faith is wont to rest for
salvation,--the death on the Cross to which we say that we trust, and
which we are so accustomed to exalt as a unique and inimitable work that
cannot be reproduced and needs no repetition, world wi