cessity. For it requires but a
superficial self-examination to discern the indications of what the
profoundest research still leaves a mystery--that we are not perfect
creatures of our own kind--that our nature does not spontaneously
conform to the Supreme Moral Law--that our highest and best consists not
in complete obedience to which we cannot attain, but in a perpetual
upward struggle. Now such a struggle demands for its indispensable
condition something fixed in our nature by which each step upwards shall
be made good as it is taken, and afford a firm footing for the next
ascent. If there were nothing in us fixed and firm, if the warfare with
evil impulses, wayward affections, overmastering appetites had to be
carried on through life without the possibility of making any victory
complete, the formation of a perpetually higher and nobler character
would be impossible; our main hope in this life, our best offering to
God would be taken away from us; we could never give our bodies to be a
living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God; we could give our separate
acts but not ourselves, for we should be utterly unable to form
ourselves into fitness for such a purpose. The task given to the will is
not only to govern the actions but to discipline the nature; but
discipline is impossible where there is no fixity in the thing to be
disciplined.

And this becomes still more important when we search more deeply and
perceive that not the nature only but the will itself is in some strange
way infected with evil. We can hardly imagine even a perfectly pure will
capable of continuing to the end a conflict in which no progress ever
was or could be made. The tremendous strain of fighting with an enemy
that might be defeated again and again for ever without ever suffering
any change or relaxing the violence of any attack or giving the
slightest hope of any relief, would seem too much for the most
unearthly, the most noble, the most godlike of human wills. But wills
such as ours, penetrated with weakness, perhaps with treachery to their
own best aspirations, how utterly impossible that they could persevere
through such a hopeless conflict.

It is the sustaining hope of the Christian that he shall be changed from
glory to glory into the image or likeness of His Lord, and that when all
is over for this life he shall be indeed like Him and see Him as He is.
But that hope is never presented as one to be realized by some sudden
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