or" was one of Duncan Mathieson's favorite expressions; and along the
line of God's revealed will how true it is! If you will only venture _now_
on Christ for "cleansing from all unrighteousness," He will do it for you
_now_. "Wilt thou not be made clean? when shall it once be?" (Jer. xiii.
27.) Why not _now_? for "cleansing" is a _crisis_ and not a _process_;
but, as Principal Moule, of Cambridge, has very tersely put it, "Cleansing
is a crisis with a view to a process." It is just here that multitudes of
God's people miss the track. "Sanctification is the _work_ of God's free
grace."[1] Of course it is; it is a "growth," a gradual process; but
"cleansing" is not "sanctification." The latter, in the sense in which it
is being used here, is a theological term embracing all the Spirit's work
in the believer between the cross and the crown; but "cleansing" is an
_act_. While sanctification is a "growth," "cleansing" is one of the
conditions of growth, and the very reason why some who hold most
tenaciously by the gradual theory of sanctification are "growing in grace"
so very slowly, is that they have not attended to one of the most
essential conditions of growth, viz., this "cleansing." "But," some one
objects, "this is not in the Standards of our Church?" That may be; but
it is in the Bible. To quote the words of the saintly Dr. Andrew Bonar in
another connection, "I believe all that is in our Standards, for I find
all that is in our Standards in the Bible; but I believe _more_ than is
in our Standards, for I find some things in my Bible that are not in the
Standards;" for the simple and very obvious reason that you cannot get a
quart into a pint measure. While every honest Churchman believes that all
that is in the Standards of the Church to which he belongs is in the
Bible, no one in his sane senses believes that _everything_ in the Bible
is to be found in the Standards. The doctrine of a "clean heart" is one
of these things.

[1: Shorter Catechism, No. 35.]

In support of the statement that "cleansing" is a crisis, an act,
something done in a moment, just as conversion is, and not a "process"
drawn out indefinitely before one can reach a state of "cleansing," let us
ponder well David's prayer, in Psalm li. 10, "Create in (margin, for) me
a clean heart." Is _creation_ an "act" or a "work"? Is it a "crisis" or a
"process"? All the Creator had to do was to speak the word and David's
prayer was granted; he then could turn