make a great resolve
about his religion, or about his conduct, will be most likely to carry
it out. Get the magical influence of habit on your side, and you will
have done much to conquer the evil of abortive resolutions.

But then there is something a great deal more than that to be said. The
Apostle did not content himself, in the passage already referred to,
with bewailing the wretchedness of the condition in which to will was
present, but how to perform he found not. He asked, and he triumphantly
answered, the question, 'Who shall deliver me?' with the great words, 'I
thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord.' There is the secret; keep near
Him, trust Him, open your hearts to the influences of that Divine Spirit
who makes us free from the law of sin and death. And if thus, knowing
our weakness, recognising our danger, humbly trying to cultivate the
habit of prompt discharge of all discerned duty, we leave ourselves in
Jesus Christ's hands, and wait, and ask, and believe that we possess,
His cleansing Spirit, then we shall not ask and wait in vain. 'Work out
your own salvation, . . . for it is God that worketh in you, both the
willing and the doing.'

ALL GRACE ABOUNDING

'God is able to make all grace abound toward you;
that ye, always having all-sufficiency in all
things, may abound to every good work.'--2 COR.
ix. 8.

In addition to all his other qualities the Apostle was an extremely good
man of business; and he had a field for the exercise of that quality in
the collection for the poor saints of Judea, which takes up so much of
this letter, and occupied for so long a period so much of his thoughts
and efforts. It was for the sake of showing by actual demonstration that
would 'touch the hearts' of the Jewish brethren, the absolute unity of
the two halves of the Church, the Gentile and the Jewish, that the
Apostle took so much trouble in this matter. The words which I have read
for my text come in the midst of a very earnest appeal to the Corinthian
Christians for their pecuniary help. He is dwelling upon the same
thought which is expressed in the well-known words: 'What I gave I kept;
what I kept I lost.'

But whilst the words of my text primarily applied to money matters, you
see that they are studiously general, universal. The Apostle, after his
fashion, is lifting up a little 'secular' affair into a high spiritual
region; and he lays down in my text a broad