human
We are not damned for doing wrong, but for not doing right. Christ, he contends,
gpt
According to Stevenson--I do not say he is right, but I do quote his words as worth attention--we are not damned so much for yielding to evil, as for not getting into our life its oppositive virtue; some content vital enough to cast out the evil, and to keep it out. To go on fighting some besetting sin is only to repeat, for the most part, an experience many of us know but too well. It almost invariably ends one way. In weariness and despair we ask:
human
Why should we war with evil? It is more than our test, it is our fate; let us take what sweet we can before it becomes all bitter. Which is but another way of saying:
gpt
Evil, be thou my good.
human
Let us, then, call it what it is--the power of God unto salvation. And how are we to get it into our possession? The answer is, it needs no getting in. Potentially it is there.
gpt
The kingdom of God is within you, says Jesus, and it is ours to bring it out in all its actual reality. It is the greater which includes the less, of the gracious possessions God has put in our being, and of which we know so little because we do not work these inward mines:
human
Work out your own salvation, for it is God that worketh in you.
gpt
Anybody might have done it, but the secret came to me.