armour and rewards, life and death. We are told of the subtilty and
ferocity of the Adversary, of the ranks and power of his evil
angels.[11]

We are sent into the world just that we might spend our life in a state
of warfare, and in so far as this condition is absent from any life,
just so far is that life a failure. To have a knowledge of the force
and resources of the enemy is as necessary to the waging of a
successful war as it is to have one's own training and equipment
complete; and he who enters upon the struggle is well armed beforehand
if he has realized the {5} seriousness of the conflict in which he is
about to engage.

Every baptized soul is a member of the army of the living God. Have we
grasped the truth that this is no light undertaking; that in this
warfare there are no quiet winter quarters into which we may retire, no
light summer campaigns to be gaily prosecuted against a foe who flees
at our first approach; but that the struggle is inevitable, that it is
real, that our enemy is powerful, sleepless, and relentless; and above
all, that we are in the thick of the conflict as long as life endures?

Even the tenderest consolations that God gives His children concerning
the warfare never lose sight of the inevitableness of it. We are given
no false encouragement that would arouse a hope of escape. The very
name by which the Body of Christ on earth is called,--the Church
Militant,--is a standing witness of what the life of her members must
be.

When St. Paul comforts the Corinthians with the assurance that the
struggle they are enduring is common to man, that God has not given
them more to endure than that which is coming upon all their brethren,
the Holy Ghost inspires him to guard this point carefully.[12] He
assures them {6} that God Who is faithful to His word, "not slack
concerning His promise,"[13] "will not suffer you to be tempted above
that ye are able." The very fact of the approach of a trial or
temptation is in itself the irrefutable proof that we are strong enough
to conquer it, if only we use faithfully what we have, and what will be
given. He then goes on to say that God "will, with the temptation also
make a way to escape"; but the escape is not to be from temptation. He
promises indeed to "make a way to escape," but only in order "_that ye
may be able to bear it_,"--the escape is to be from the failure, from
sin, never from the conflict so long as life endures. "There is no