Chapter 26

I. Sanctification.1. Definition of Sanctification.Sanctification is that continuous operation of the Holy Spirit, by which the holy disposition imparted in regeneration is maintained and strengthened.Godet:“The work of Jesus in the world is twofold. It is a work accomplishedfor us, destined to effectreconciliationbetween God and man; it is a work accomplishedin us, with the object of effecting oursanctification. By the one, a rightrelationis established between God and us; by the other, thefruitof the reëstablished order is secured. By the former, the condemned sinner is received into the state of grace; by the latter, the pardoned sinner is associated with the life of God.... How many express themselves as if, when forgiveness with the peace which it procures has been once obtained, all is finished and the work of salvation is complete! They seem to have no suspicion that salvation consists in the health of the soul, and that the health of the soul consists in holiness. Forgiveness is not the reëstablishment of health; it is the crisis of convalescence. If God thinks fit to declare the sinner righteous, it is in order that he may by that means restore him to holiness.”O. P. Gifford:“The steamship whose machinery is broken may be brought into port and made fast to the dock. She issafe, but notsound. Repairs may last a long time. Christ designs to make us both safe and sound. Justification gives the first—safety; sanctification gives the second—soundness.”Bradford, Heredity and Christian Problems, 220—“To be conscious that one is forgiven, and yet that at the same time he is so polluted that he cannot beget a child without handing on to that child a nature which will be as bad as if his father had never been forgiven, is not salvation in anyrealsense.”We would say: Is not salvation in anycompletesense. Justification needs sanctification to follow it. Man needs God to continue and preserve his spiritual life, just as much as he needed God to begin it at the first. Creation in the spiritual, as well as in the natural world, needs to be supplemented by preservation; see quotation from Jonathan Edwards, in Allen's biography of him, 371.Regeneration is instantaneous, but sanctification takes time. The“developing”of the photographer's picture may illustrate God's process of sanctifying the regenerate soul. But it is development by new access of truth or light, while the photographer's picture is usually developed in the dark. This development cannot be accomplished in a moment.“We try in our religious lives to practise instantaneous photography. One minute for prayer will give us a vision of God, and we think that is enough. Our pictures are poor because our negatives are weak. We do not give God a long enough sitting to get a good likeness.”Salvation is something past, something present, and something future; a past fact, justification; a present process, sanctification; a future consummation, redemption and glory. David, in Ps. 51:1, 2, prays not only that God will blot out his transgressions (justification), but that God will wash him thoroughly from his iniquity (sanctification). E. G. Robinson:“Sanctification consistsnegatively, in the removal of the penal consequences of sin from the moral nature;positively, in the progressive implanting and growth of a new principle of life.... The Christian church is a succession of copies of the character of Christ. Paul never says:‘be ye imitators of me’(1 Cor. 4:16), except when writing to those who had no copies of the New Testament or of the Gospels.”Clarke, Christian Theology, 366—“Sanctification does not mean perfection reached, but the progress of the divine life toward perfection. Sanctification is the Christianizing of the Christian.”It is not simply deliverance from the penalty of sin, but the development of a divine life that conquers sin. A. A. Hodge, Popular Lectures, 343—“Any man who thinks he is a Christian, and that he has accepted Christ for justification, when he did not at the same time accept him for sanctification, is miserably deluded in that very experience.”This definition implies:(a) That, although in regeneration the governing disposition of the soul is made holy, there still remain tendencies to evil which are unsubdued.John 13:10—“He that is bathed needeth not save to wash his feet, but is clean every whit[i. e., as a whole]”;Rom. 6:12—“Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body, that ye should obey the lusts thereof”—sindwells[pg 870]in a believer, but itreignsin an unbeliever (C. H. M.). Subordinate volitions in the Christian are not always determined in character by the fundamental choice; eddies in the stream sometimes run counter to the general course of the current.This doctrine is the opposite of that expressed in the phrase:“the essential divinity of the human.”Not culture, but crucifixion, is what the Holy Spirit prescribes for the natural man. There are two natures in the Christian, as Paul shows inRomans 7. The one flourishes at the other's expense. The vine dresser has to cut the rank shoots from self, that all our force may be thrown into growing fruit. Deadwood must be cut out; living wood must be cut back (John 15:2). Sanctification is not a matter of course, which will go on whatever we do, or do not do. It requires a direct superintendence and surgery on the one hand, and, on the other hand a practical hatred of evil on our part that coöperates with the husbandry of God.(b) That the existence in the believer of these two opposing principles gives rise to a conflict which lasts through life.Gal. 5:17—“For the flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh; for these are contrary the one to the other; that ye may not do the things that ye would”—not, as the A. V. had it,“so that ye cannot do the things that ye would”; the Spirit who dwells in believers is represented as enabling them successfully to resist those tendencies to evil which naturally exist within them;James 4:5(the marginal and better reading)—“That spirit which he made to dwell in us yearneth for us even unto jealous envy”—i. e., God's love, like all true love, longs to have its objects wholly for its own. The Christian is two men in one; but he is to“put away the old man”and“put on the new man”(Eph. 4:22, 23). Compare Ecclesiasticus 2:1—“My son, if thou dost set out to serve the Lord, prepare thy soul for temptation.”1 Tim. 6:12—“fight the good fight of the faith”—ἀγωνίζου τὸν καλὸν ἀγῶνα τῆς πίστεως = the beautiful, honorable, glorious fight; since it has a noble helper, incentive, and reward. It is the commonest of all struggles, but the issue determines our destiny. An Indian received as a gift some tobacco in which he found a half dollar hidden. He brought it back next day, saying that good Indian had fought all night with bad Indian, one telling him to keep, the other telling him to return.(c) That in this conflict the Holy Spirit enables the Christian, through increasing faith, more fully and consciously to appropriate Christ, and thus progressively to make conquest of the remaining sinfulness of his nature.Rom. 8:13, 14—“for if ye live after the flesh, ye must die; but if by the Spirit ye put to death the deeds of the body, ye shall live. For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, these are sons of God”;1 Cor. 6:11—“but ye were washed, but ye were sanctified, but ye were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, and in the Spirit of our God”;James 1:26—“If any man thinketh himself to be religious, while he bridleth not his tongue but deceiveth his heart, this man's religion is vain”—see Com. of Neander,in loco—“That religion is merely imaginary, seeming, unreal, which allows the continuance of the moral defects originally predominant in the character.”The Christian is“crucified with Christ”(Gal. 2:20); but the crucified man does not die at once. Yet he is as good as dead. Even after the old man is crucified we are still to mortify him, or put him to death (Rom. 8:13; Col. 3:5). We are to cut down the old rosebush and cultivate only the new shoot that is grafted into it. Here is our probation as Christians. So“die Scene wird zum Tribunal”—the play of life becomes God's judgment.Dr. Hastings:“When Bourdaloue was probing the conscience of Louis XIV, applying to him the words of St. Paul and intending to paraphrase them:‘For the good which I would, I do not, but the evil which I would not, that I do,’‘I find two men in me’—the King interrupted the great preacher with the memorable exclamation:‘Ah, these two men, I know them well!’Bourdaloue answered:‘It is already something toknowthem, Sire; but it is not enough,—one of the two must perish.’”And, in the genuine believer, the old does little by little die, and the new takes its place, as“David waxed stronger and stronger, but the house of Saul waxed weaker and weaker”(2 Sam. 3:1). As the Welsh minister found himself after awhile thinking and dreaming in English, so the language of Canaan becomes to the Christian his native and only speech.2. Explanations and Scripture Proof.(a) Sanctification is the work of God.1 Thess. 5:23—“And the God of peace himself sanctify you wholly.”Much of our modern literature ignores man's dependence upon God, and some of it seems distinctly intended to teach[pg 871]the opposite doctrine. Auerbach's“On the Heights,”for example, teaches that man can make his own atonement; and“The Villa on the Rhine,”by the same author, teaches that man can sanctify himself. The proper inscription for many modern French novels is:“Entertainment here for man and beast.”TheTendenznovelleof Germany has its imitators in the sceptical novels of England. And no doctrine in these novels is so common as the doctrine that man needs no Savior but himself.(b) It is a continuous process.Phil. 1:6—“being confident of this very thing, that he who began a good work in you will perfect it until the day of Jesus Christ”;3:15—“Let us therefore, as many as are perfect, be thus minded: and if in anything ye are otherwise minded, this also shall God reveal unto you”;Col. 3:9, 10—“lie not one to another; seeing that ye have put off the old man with his doings, and have put on the new man, that is being renewed unto knowledge after the image of him that created him”;cf.Acts 2:47—“those that were being saved”;1 Cor. 1:18—“unto us who are being saved”;2 Cor. 2:15—“in them that are being saved”;1 Thess. 2:12—“God, who calleth you into his own kingdom and glory.”C. H. Parkhurst:“The yeast does not strike through the whole lump of dough at a flash. We keep finding unsuspected lumps of meal that the yeast has not yet seized upon. We surrender to God in instalments. We may not mean to do it, but we do it. Conversion has got to be brought down to date.”A student asked the President of Oberlin College whether he could not take a shorter course than the one prescribed.“Oh yes,”replied the President,“but then it depends on what you want to make of yourself. When God wants to make an oak, he takes a hundred years, but when he wants to make a squash, he takes six months.”(c) It is distinguished from regeneration as growth from birth, or as the strengthening of a holy disposition from the original impartation of it.Eph. 4:15—“speaking the truth in love, may grow up in all things into him, who is the head, even Christ”;1 Thess. 3:12—“the Lord make you to increase and abound in love one toward another, and toward all men”;2 Pet. 3:18—“But grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ”;cf.1 Pet. 1:23—“begotten again, not of corruptible seed, but of incorruptible, through the word of God, which liveth and abideth”;1 John 3:9—“Whosoever is begotten of God doeth no sin, because his seed abideth in him: and he cannot sin, because he is begotten of God.”Not sin only, but holiness also, is a germ whose nature is to grow. The new love in the believer's heart follows the law of all life, in developing and extending itself under God's husbandry. George Eliot:“The reward of one duty done is the power to do another.”J. W. A. Stewart:“When the 21st of March has come, we say‘The back of the winter is broken.’There will still be alternations of frost, but the progress will be towards heat. The coming of summer is sure,—in germ the summer is already here.”Regeneration is the crisis of a disease; sanctification is the progress of convalescence.Yet growth is not a uniform thing in the tree or in the Christian. In some single months there is more growth than in all the year besides. During the rest of the year, however, there is solidification, without which the green timber would be useless. The period of rapid growth, when woody fibre is actually deposited between the bark and the trunk, occupies but four to six weeks in May, June, and July.2 Pet. 1:5—“adding on your part all diligence, in your faith supply virtue; and in your virtue knowledge”—adding to the central grace all those that are complementary and subordinate, till they attain the harmony of a chorus (ἐπιχορηγήσατε).(d) The operation of God reveals itself in, and is accompanied by, intelligent and voluntary activity of the believer in the discovery and mortification of sinful desires, and in the bringing of the whole being into obedience to Christ and conformity to the standards of his word.John 17:17—“Sanctify them in the truth: thy word is truth”;2 Cor. 10:5—“casting down imaginations, and every high thing that is exalted against the knowledge of God, and bringing every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ”;Phil. 2:12, 13—“work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God who worketh in you both to will and to work, for his good pleasure”;1 Pet. 2:2—“as new-born babes, long for the spiritual milk which is without guile, that ye may grow thereby unto salvation.”John 15:3—“Already ye are clean because of the word which I have spoken unto you.”Regeneration through the word is followed by sanctification through the word.Eph. 5:1—“Be ye therefore imitators of God, as beloved children.”Imitation is at first a painful effort of will, as in learning the piano; afterwards it becomes pleasurable and even unconscious. Children unconsciously imitate the handwriting of their parents. Charles Lamb sees in the mirror, as he is shaving, the apparition of his dead[pg 872]father. So our likeness to God comes out as we advance in years.Col. 3:4—“When Christ who is our life, shall be manifested, then shall ye also with him be manifested in glory.”Horace Bushnell said that, if the stars did not move, they would rot in the sky. The man who rides the bicycle must either go on, or go off. A large part of sanctification consists in the formation of proper habits, such as the habit of Scripture reading, of secret prayer, of church going, of efforts to convert and benefit others. Baxter:“Every man must grow, as trees grow, downward and upward at once. The visible outward growth must be accompanied by an invisible inward growth.”Drummond:“The spiritual man having passed from death to life, the natural man must pass from life to death.”There must be increasing sense of sin:“My sins gave sharpness to the nails, And pointed every thorn.”There must be a bringing of new and yet newer regions of thought, feeling, and action, under the sway of Christ and his truth. There is a grain of truth even in Macaulay's jest about“essentially Christian cookery.”A. J. Gordon, Ministry of the Spirit, 63, 109-111—“The church is Christian no more than as it is the organ of the continuous passion of Christ. We must suffer with sinning and lost humanity, and so‘fill up ... that which is lacking of the afflictions of Christ’(Col. 1:24). Christ's crucifixion must be prolonged side by side with his resurrection. There are three deaths: 1. death in sin, our natural condition; 2. death for sin, our judicial condition; 3. death to sin, our sanctified condition.... As the ascending sap in the tree crowds off the dead leaves which in spite of storm and frost cling to the branches all the winter long, so does the Holy Spirit within us, when allowed full sway, subdue and expel the remnants of our sinful nature.”(e) The agency through which God effects the sanctification of the believer is the indwelling Spirit of Christ.John 14:17, 18—“the Spirit of truth ... he abideth with you, and shall be in you. I will not leave you desolate; I come unto you”;15:3-5—“Already ye are clean.... Abide in me ... apart from me ye can do nothing”;Rom. 8:9, 10—“the Spirit of God dwelleth in you. But if any man hath not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of his. And if Christ is in you, the body is dead because of sin; but the spirit is life because of righteousness”;1 Cor. 1:2, 30—“sanctified in Christ Jesus ... Christ Jesus, who was made unto us ... sanctification”;6:19—“know ye not that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit which is in you, which ye have from God?”Gal. 5:16—“Walk by the Spirit, and ye shall not fulfil the lust of the flesh”;Eph. 5:18—“And be not drunken with wine, wherein is riot, but be filled with the Spirit”;Col. 1:27-29—“the riches of the glory of this mystery among the Gentiles, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory: whom we proclaim, admonishing every man and teaching every man in all wisdom, that we may present every man perfect in Christ; whereunto I labor also, striving according to his working, which worketh in me mightily”;2 Tim. 1:14—“That good thing which was committed unto thee guard through the Holy Spirit which dwelleth in us.”Christianity substitutes for the old sources of excitement the power of the Holy Spirit. Here is a source of comfort, energy, and joy, infinitely superior to any which the sinner knows. God does not leave the soul to fall back upon itself. The higher up we get in the scale of being, the more does the new life need nursing and tending,—compare the sapling and the babe. God gives to the Christian, therefore, an abiding presence and work of the Holy Spirit,—not only regeneration, but sanctification. C. E. Smith, Baptism of Fire:“The soul needs the latter as well as the former rain, the sealing as well as the renewing of the Spirit, the baptism of fire as well as the baptism of water. Sealing gives something additional to the document, an evidence plainer than the writing within, both to one's self and to others.”“Few flowers yield more honey than serves the bee for its daily food.”So we must first live ourselves off from our spiritual diet; only what is over can be given to nourish others. Thomas à Kempis, Imitation of Christ:“Have peace in thine own heart; else thou wilt never be able to communicate peace to others.”Godet:“Man is a vessel destined to receive God, a vessel which must be enlarged in proportion as it is filled, and filled in proportion as it is enlarged.”Matthew Arnold, Morality:“We cannot kindle when we will The fire which in the heart resides; The Spirit bloweth and is still; In mystery our soul abides. But tasks in hours of insight willed Can be in hours of gloom fulfilled. With aching hands and bleeding feet, We dig and heap, lay stone on stone; We bear the burden and the heat Of the long day, and wish 't were done. Not till the hours of light return All we have built do we discern.”(f) The mediate or instrumental cause of sanctification, as of justification, is faith.[pg 873]Acts 15:9—“cleansing their hearts by faith”;Rom. 1:17—“For therein is revealed a righteousness of God from faith unto faith: as it is written, But the righteous shall live from faith.”The righteousness includes sanctification as well as justification; and the subject of the epistle to the Romans is not simply justification by faith, but rather righteousness by faith, or salvation by faith. Justification by faith is the subject ofchapters 1-7; sanctification by faith is the subject ofchapters 8-16. We are not sanctified by efforts of our own, any more than we are justified by efforts of our own.God does not share with us the glory of sanctification, any more than he shares with us the glory of justification. He must do all, or nothing. William Law:“A root set in the finest soil, in the best climate, and blessed with all that sun and air and rain can do for it, is not in so sure a way of its growth to perfection, as every man may be whose spirit aspires after all that which God is ready and infinitely desirous to give him. For the sun meets not the springing bud that stretches toward him with half that certainty as God, the source of all good, communicates himself to the soul that longs to partake of him.”(g) The object of this faith is Christ himself, as the head of a new humanity and the source of truth and life to those united to him.2 Cor. 3:18—“we all, with unveiled face, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are transformed into the same image from glory to glory, even as from the Lord the Spirit”;Eph. 4:13—“till we all attain unto the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a fullgrown man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ.”Faith here is of course much more than intellectual faith,—it is the reception of Christ himself. As Christianity furnishes a new source of life and energy—in the Holy Spirit: so it gives a new object of attention and regard—the Lord Jesus Christ. As we get air out of a vessel by pouring in water, so we can drive sin out only by bringing Christ in. See Chalmers' Sermon on The Expulsive Power of a New Affection. Drummond, Nat. Law in the Spir. World, 123-140—“Man does not grow by making efforts to grow, but by putting himself into the conditions of growth by living in Christ.”1 John 3:3—“every one that hath this hope set on him(ἐπ᾽ αὐτῷ)purifieth himself, even as he is pure.”Sanctification does not begin from within. The objective Savior must come first. The hope based on him must give the motive and the standard of self-purification. Likeness comes from liking. We grow to be like that which we like. Hence we use the phrase“I like,”as a synonym for“I love.”We cannot remove frost from our window by rubbing the pane; we need to kindle a fire. Growth is not the product of effort, but of life.“Taking thought,”or“being anxious”(Mat. 6:27), is not the way to grow. Only take the hindrances out of the way, and we grow without care, as the tree does. The moon makes no effort to shine, nor has it any power of its own to shine. It is only a burnt out cinder in the sky. It shines only as it reflects the light of the sun. So we can shine“as lights in the world”(Phil. 2:15), only as we reflect Christ, who is“the Sun of Righteousness”(Mal. 4:2) and“the Light of the world”(John 8:12).(h) Though the weakest faith perfectly justifies, the degree of sanctification is measured by the strength of the Christian's faith, and the persistence with which he apprehends Christ in the various relations which the Scriptures declare him to sustain to us.Mat. 9:29—“According to your faith be it done unto you”;Luke 17:5—“Lord, increase our faith”;Rom. 12:2—“be not fashioned according to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is the good and acceptable and perfect will of God”;13:14—“But put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh, to fulfil the lusts thereof”;Eph. 4:24—“put on the new man, that after God hath been created in righteousness and holiness of truth”;1 Tim. 4:7—“exercise thyself unto godliness.”Leighton:“None of the children of God are born dumb.”Milton:“Good, the more communicated, the more abundant grows.”Faith can neither be stationary nor complete (Westcott, Bible Com. onJohn 15:8—“so shall ye become my disciples”). Luther:“He whoisa Christian isnoChristian”;“Christianus non in esse, sed in fieri.”In a Bible that belonged to Oliver Cromwell is this inscription:“O. C. 1644. Qui cessat esse melior cessat esse bonus”—“He who ceases to be better ceases to be good.”Story, the sculptor, when asked which of his works he valued most, replied:“My next.”The greatest work of the Holy Spirit is the perfecting of Christian character.Col. 1:10—“Increasing by the knowledge of God”—here the instrumental dative represents the knowledge of God as the dew or rain which nurtures the growth of the plant (Lightfoot).[pg 874]Mr. Gladstone had the habit of reading the Bible every Sunday afternoon to old women on his estate. Tholuck:“I have but one passion, and that is Christ.”This is an echo of Paul's words:“to me to live is Christ”(Phil. 1:21). But Paul is far from thinking that he has already obtained, or is already made perfect. He prays“that I may gain Christ, ... that I may know him”(Phil. 3:8, 10).(i) From the lack of persistence in using the means appointed for Christian growth—such as the word of God, prayer, association with other believers, and personal effort for the conversion of the ungodly—sanctification does not always proceed in regular and unbroken course, and it is never completed in this life.Phil. 3:12—“Not that I have already obtained, or am already made perfect: but I press on, if so be that I may lay hold on that for which also I was laid hold on by Jesus Christ”;1 John 1:8—“If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.”Carlyle, in his Life of John Sterling, chap. 8, says of Coleridge, that“whenever natural obligation or voluntary undertaking made it his duty to do anything, the fact seemed a sufficient reason for hisnotdoing it.”A regular, advancing sanctification is marked, on the other hand, by a growing habit of instant and joyful obedience. The intermittent spring depends upon the reservoir in the mountain cave,—only when the rain fills the latter full, does the spring begin to flow. So to secure unbroken Christian activity, there must be constant reception of the word and Spirit of God.Galen:“If diseases take hold of the body, there is nothing so certain to drive them out as diligent exercise.”Williams, Principles of Medicine:“Want of exercise and sedentary habits not only predispose to, but actually cause, disease.”The little girl who fell out of bed at night was asked how it happened. She replied that she went to sleep too near where she got in. Some Christians lose the joy of their religion by ceasing their Christian activities too soon after conversion. Yet others cultivate their spiritual lives from mere selfishness. Selfishness follows the line of least resistance. It is easier to pray in public and to attend meetings for prayer, than it is to go out into the unsympathetic world and engage in the work of winning souls. This is the fault of monasticism. Those grow most who forget themselves in their work for others. The discipline of life is ordained in God's providence to correct tendencies to indolence. Even this discipline is often received in a rebellious spirit. The result is delay in the process of sanctification. Bengel:“Deus habet horas et moras”—“God has his hours and his delays.”German proverb:“Gut Ding will Weile haben”—“A good thing requires time.”(j) Sanctification, both of the soul and of the body of the believer, is completed in the life to come,—that of the former at death, that of the latter at the resurrection.Phil. 3:21—“who shall fashion anew the body of our humiliation, that it may be conformed to the body of his glory, according to the working whereby he is able even to subject all things unto himself”;Col. 3:4—“When Christ, who is our life, shall be manifested, then shall we also with him be manifested in glory”;Heb. 12:14, 23—“Follow after peace with all men, and the sanctification without which no man shall see the Lord ... spirits of just men made perfect”;1 John 3:2—“Beloved, now are we children of God, and it is not yet made manifest what we shall be. We know that, if he shall be manifested, we shall be like him; for we shall see him even as he is”;Jude 24—“able to guard you from stumbling, and to set you before the presence of his glory without blemish in exceeding joy”;Rev. 14:5—“And in their mouth was found no lie: they are without blemish.”A. J. Gordon, Ministry of the Spirit, 121, puts the completion of our sanctification, not at death, but at the appearing of the Lord“a second time, apart from sin, ... unto salvation”(Heb. 9:28; 1 Thess. 3:13; 5:23). When we shall see him as he is, instantaneous photographing of his image in our souls will take the place of the present slow progress from glory to glory (2 Cor. 3:18; 1 John 3:2). If by sanctification we mean, not a sloughing off of remaining depravity, but an ever increasing purity and perfection, then we may hold that the process of sanctification goes on forever. Our relation to Christ must always be that of the imperfect to the perfect, of the finite to the infinite; and for finite spirits, progress must always be possible. Clarke, Christian Theology, 373—“Not even at death can sanctification end.... The goal lies far beyond deliverance from sin.... There is no such thing as bringing the divine life to such completion that no further progress is possible to it.... Indeed, free and unhampered progress can scarcely begin until[pg 875]sin is left behind.”“O snows so pure, O peaks so high! I shall not reach you till I die!”As Jesus' resurrection was prepared by holiness of life, so the Christian's resurrection is prepared by sanctification. When our souls are freed from the last remains of sin, then it will not be possible for us to be holden by death (cf.Acts 2:24). See Gordon, The Twofold Life, or Christ's Work for us and in us; Brit. and For. Evang. Rev., April, 1884:205-229; Van Oosterzee, Christian Dogmatics, 657-662.

I. Sanctification.1. Definition of Sanctification.Sanctification is that continuous operation of the Holy Spirit, by which the holy disposition imparted in regeneration is maintained and strengthened.Godet:“The work of Jesus in the world is twofold. It is a work accomplishedfor us, destined to effectreconciliationbetween God and man; it is a work accomplishedin us, with the object of effecting oursanctification. By the one, a rightrelationis established between God and us; by the other, thefruitof the reëstablished order is secured. By the former, the condemned sinner is received into the state of grace; by the latter, the pardoned sinner is associated with the life of God.... How many express themselves as if, when forgiveness with the peace which it procures has been once obtained, all is finished and the work of salvation is complete! They seem to have no suspicion that salvation consists in the health of the soul, and that the health of the soul consists in holiness. Forgiveness is not the reëstablishment of health; it is the crisis of convalescence. If God thinks fit to declare the sinner righteous, it is in order that he may by that means restore him to holiness.”O. P. Gifford:“The steamship whose machinery is broken may be brought into port and made fast to the dock. She issafe, but notsound. Repairs may last a long time. Christ designs to make us both safe and sound. Justification gives the first—safety; sanctification gives the second—soundness.”Bradford, Heredity and Christian Problems, 220—“To be conscious that one is forgiven, and yet that at the same time he is so polluted that he cannot beget a child without handing on to that child a nature which will be as bad as if his father had never been forgiven, is not salvation in anyrealsense.”We would say: Is not salvation in anycompletesense. Justification needs sanctification to follow it. Man needs God to continue and preserve his spiritual life, just as much as he needed God to begin it at the first. Creation in the spiritual, as well as in the natural world, needs to be supplemented by preservation; see quotation from Jonathan Edwards, in Allen's biography of him, 371.Regeneration is instantaneous, but sanctification takes time. The“developing”of the photographer's picture may illustrate God's process of sanctifying the regenerate soul. But it is development by new access of truth or light, while the photographer's picture is usually developed in the dark. This development cannot be accomplished in a moment.“We try in our religious lives to practise instantaneous photography. One minute for prayer will give us a vision of God, and we think that is enough. Our pictures are poor because our negatives are weak. We do not give God a long enough sitting to get a good likeness.”Salvation is something past, something present, and something future; a past fact, justification; a present process, sanctification; a future consummation, redemption and glory. David, in Ps. 51:1, 2, prays not only that God will blot out his transgressions (justification), but that God will wash him thoroughly from his iniquity (sanctification). E. G. Robinson:“Sanctification consistsnegatively, in the removal of the penal consequences of sin from the moral nature;positively, in the progressive implanting and growth of a new principle of life.... The Christian church is a succession of copies of the character of Christ. Paul never says:‘be ye imitators of me’(1 Cor. 4:16), except when writing to those who had no copies of the New Testament or of the Gospels.”Clarke, Christian Theology, 366—“Sanctification does not mean perfection reached, but the progress of the divine life toward perfection. Sanctification is the Christianizing of the Christian.”It is not simply deliverance from the penalty of sin, but the development of a divine life that conquers sin. A. A. Hodge, Popular Lectures, 343—“Any man who thinks he is a Christian, and that he has accepted Christ for justification, when he did not at the same time accept him for sanctification, is miserably deluded in that very experience.”This definition implies:(a) That, although in regeneration the governing disposition of the soul is made holy, there still remain tendencies to evil which are unsubdued.John 13:10—“He that is bathed needeth not save to wash his feet, but is clean every whit[i. e., as a whole]”;Rom. 6:12—“Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body, that ye should obey the lusts thereof”—sindwells[pg 870]in a believer, but itreignsin an unbeliever (C. H. M.). Subordinate volitions in the Christian are not always determined in character by the fundamental choice; eddies in the stream sometimes run counter to the general course of the current.This doctrine is the opposite of that expressed in the phrase:“the essential divinity of the human.”Not culture, but crucifixion, is what the Holy Spirit prescribes for the natural man. There are two natures in the Christian, as Paul shows inRomans 7. The one flourishes at the other's expense. The vine dresser has to cut the rank shoots from self, that all our force may be thrown into growing fruit. Deadwood must be cut out; living wood must be cut back (John 15:2). Sanctification is not a matter of course, which will go on whatever we do, or do not do. It requires a direct superintendence and surgery on the one hand, and, on the other hand a practical hatred of evil on our part that coöperates with the husbandry of God.(b) That the existence in the believer of these two opposing principles gives rise to a conflict which lasts through life.Gal. 5:17—“For the flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh; for these are contrary the one to the other; that ye may not do the things that ye would”—not, as the A. V. had it,“so that ye cannot do the things that ye would”; the Spirit who dwells in believers is represented as enabling them successfully to resist those tendencies to evil which naturally exist within them;James 4:5(the marginal and better reading)—“That spirit which he made to dwell in us yearneth for us even unto jealous envy”—i. e., God's love, like all true love, longs to have its objects wholly for its own. The Christian is two men in one; but he is to“put away the old man”and“put on the new man”(Eph. 4:22, 23). Compare Ecclesiasticus 2:1—“My son, if thou dost set out to serve the Lord, prepare thy soul for temptation.”1 Tim. 6:12—“fight the good fight of the faith”—ἀγωνίζου τὸν καλὸν ἀγῶνα τῆς πίστεως = the beautiful, honorable, glorious fight; since it has a noble helper, incentive, and reward. It is the commonest of all struggles, but the issue determines our destiny. An Indian received as a gift some tobacco in which he found a half dollar hidden. He brought it back next day, saying that good Indian had fought all night with bad Indian, one telling him to keep, the other telling him to return.(c) That in this conflict the Holy Spirit enables the Christian, through increasing faith, more fully and consciously to appropriate Christ, and thus progressively to make conquest of the remaining sinfulness of his nature.Rom. 8:13, 14—“for if ye live after the flesh, ye must die; but if by the Spirit ye put to death the deeds of the body, ye shall live. For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, these are sons of God”;1 Cor. 6:11—“but ye were washed, but ye were sanctified, but ye were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, and in the Spirit of our God”;James 1:26—“If any man thinketh himself to be religious, while he bridleth not his tongue but deceiveth his heart, this man's religion is vain”—see Com. of Neander,in loco—“That religion is merely imaginary, seeming, unreal, which allows the continuance of the moral defects originally predominant in the character.”The Christian is“crucified with Christ”(Gal. 2:20); but the crucified man does not die at once. Yet he is as good as dead. Even after the old man is crucified we are still to mortify him, or put him to death (Rom. 8:13; Col. 3:5). We are to cut down the old rosebush and cultivate only the new shoot that is grafted into it. Here is our probation as Christians. So“die Scene wird zum Tribunal”—the play of life becomes God's judgment.Dr. Hastings:“When Bourdaloue was probing the conscience of Louis XIV, applying to him the words of St. Paul and intending to paraphrase them:‘For the good which I would, I do not, but the evil which I would not, that I do,’‘I find two men in me’—the King interrupted the great preacher with the memorable exclamation:‘Ah, these two men, I know them well!’Bourdaloue answered:‘It is already something toknowthem, Sire; but it is not enough,—one of the two must perish.’”And, in the genuine believer, the old does little by little die, and the new takes its place, as“David waxed stronger and stronger, but the house of Saul waxed weaker and weaker”(2 Sam. 3:1). As the Welsh minister found himself after awhile thinking and dreaming in English, so the language of Canaan becomes to the Christian his native and only speech.2. Explanations and Scripture Proof.(a) Sanctification is the work of God.1 Thess. 5:23—“And the God of peace himself sanctify you wholly.”Much of our modern literature ignores man's dependence upon God, and some of it seems distinctly intended to teach[pg 871]the opposite doctrine. Auerbach's“On the Heights,”for example, teaches that man can make his own atonement; and“The Villa on the Rhine,”by the same author, teaches that man can sanctify himself. The proper inscription for many modern French novels is:“Entertainment here for man and beast.”TheTendenznovelleof Germany has its imitators in the sceptical novels of England. And no doctrine in these novels is so common as the doctrine that man needs no Savior but himself.(b) It is a continuous process.Phil. 1:6—“being confident of this very thing, that he who began a good work in you will perfect it until the day of Jesus Christ”;3:15—“Let us therefore, as many as are perfect, be thus minded: and if in anything ye are otherwise minded, this also shall God reveal unto you”;Col. 3:9, 10—“lie not one to another; seeing that ye have put off the old man with his doings, and have put on the new man, that is being renewed unto knowledge after the image of him that created him”;cf.Acts 2:47—“those that were being saved”;1 Cor. 1:18—“unto us who are being saved”;2 Cor. 2:15—“in them that are being saved”;1 Thess. 2:12—“God, who calleth you into his own kingdom and glory.”C. H. Parkhurst:“The yeast does not strike through the whole lump of dough at a flash. We keep finding unsuspected lumps of meal that the yeast has not yet seized upon. We surrender to God in instalments. We may not mean to do it, but we do it. Conversion has got to be brought down to date.”A student asked the President of Oberlin College whether he could not take a shorter course than the one prescribed.“Oh yes,”replied the President,“but then it depends on what you want to make of yourself. When God wants to make an oak, he takes a hundred years, but when he wants to make a squash, he takes six months.”(c) It is distinguished from regeneration as growth from birth, or as the strengthening of a holy disposition from the original impartation of it.Eph. 4:15—“speaking the truth in love, may grow up in all things into him, who is the head, even Christ”;1 Thess. 3:12—“the Lord make you to increase and abound in love one toward another, and toward all men”;2 Pet. 3:18—“But grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ”;cf.1 Pet. 1:23—“begotten again, not of corruptible seed, but of incorruptible, through the word of God, which liveth and abideth”;1 John 3:9—“Whosoever is begotten of God doeth no sin, because his seed abideth in him: and he cannot sin, because he is begotten of God.”Not sin only, but holiness also, is a germ whose nature is to grow. The new love in the believer's heart follows the law of all life, in developing and extending itself under God's husbandry. George Eliot:“The reward of one duty done is the power to do another.”J. W. A. Stewart:“When the 21st of March has come, we say‘The back of the winter is broken.’There will still be alternations of frost, but the progress will be towards heat. The coming of summer is sure,—in germ the summer is already here.”Regeneration is the crisis of a disease; sanctification is the progress of convalescence.Yet growth is not a uniform thing in the tree or in the Christian. In some single months there is more growth than in all the year besides. During the rest of the year, however, there is solidification, without which the green timber would be useless. The period of rapid growth, when woody fibre is actually deposited between the bark and the trunk, occupies but four to six weeks in May, June, and July.2 Pet. 1:5—“adding on your part all diligence, in your faith supply virtue; and in your virtue knowledge”—adding to the central grace all those that are complementary and subordinate, till they attain the harmony of a chorus (ἐπιχορηγήσατε).(d) The operation of God reveals itself in, and is accompanied by, intelligent and voluntary activity of the believer in the discovery and mortification of sinful desires, and in the bringing of the whole being into obedience to Christ and conformity to the standards of his word.John 17:17—“Sanctify them in the truth: thy word is truth”;2 Cor. 10:5—“casting down imaginations, and every high thing that is exalted against the knowledge of God, and bringing every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ”;Phil. 2:12, 13—“work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God who worketh in you both to will and to work, for his good pleasure”;1 Pet. 2:2—“as new-born babes, long for the spiritual milk which is without guile, that ye may grow thereby unto salvation.”John 15:3—“Already ye are clean because of the word which I have spoken unto you.”Regeneration through the word is followed by sanctification through the word.Eph. 5:1—“Be ye therefore imitators of God, as beloved children.”Imitation is at first a painful effort of will, as in learning the piano; afterwards it becomes pleasurable and even unconscious. Children unconsciously imitate the handwriting of their parents. Charles Lamb sees in the mirror, as he is shaving, the apparition of his dead[pg 872]father. So our likeness to God comes out as we advance in years.Col. 3:4—“When Christ who is our life, shall be manifested, then shall ye also with him be manifested in glory.”Horace Bushnell said that, if the stars did not move, they would rot in the sky. The man who rides the bicycle must either go on, or go off. A large part of sanctification consists in the formation of proper habits, such as the habit of Scripture reading, of secret prayer, of church going, of efforts to convert and benefit others. Baxter:“Every man must grow, as trees grow, downward and upward at once. The visible outward growth must be accompanied by an invisible inward growth.”Drummond:“The spiritual man having passed from death to life, the natural man must pass from life to death.”There must be increasing sense of sin:“My sins gave sharpness to the nails, And pointed every thorn.”There must be a bringing of new and yet newer regions of thought, feeling, and action, under the sway of Christ and his truth. There is a grain of truth even in Macaulay's jest about“essentially Christian cookery.”A. J. Gordon, Ministry of the Spirit, 63, 109-111—“The church is Christian no more than as it is the organ of the continuous passion of Christ. We must suffer with sinning and lost humanity, and so‘fill up ... that which is lacking of the afflictions of Christ’(Col. 1:24). Christ's crucifixion must be prolonged side by side with his resurrection. There are three deaths: 1. death in sin, our natural condition; 2. death for sin, our judicial condition; 3. death to sin, our sanctified condition.... As the ascending sap in the tree crowds off the dead leaves which in spite of storm and frost cling to the branches all the winter long, so does the Holy Spirit within us, when allowed full sway, subdue and expel the remnants of our sinful nature.”(e) The agency through which God effects the sanctification of the believer is the indwelling Spirit of Christ.John 14:17, 18—“the Spirit of truth ... he abideth with you, and shall be in you. I will not leave you desolate; I come unto you”;15:3-5—“Already ye are clean.... Abide in me ... apart from me ye can do nothing”;Rom. 8:9, 10—“the Spirit of God dwelleth in you. But if any man hath not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of his. And if Christ is in you, the body is dead because of sin; but the spirit is life because of righteousness”;1 Cor. 1:2, 30—“sanctified in Christ Jesus ... Christ Jesus, who was made unto us ... sanctification”;6:19—“know ye not that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit which is in you, which ye have from God?”Gal. 5:16—“Walk by the Spirit, and ye shall not fulfil the lust of the flesh”;Eph. 5:18—“And be not drunken with wine, wherein is riot, but be filled with the Spirit”;Col. 1:27-29—“the riches of the glory of this mystery among the Gentiles, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory: whom we proclaim, admonishing every man and teaching every man in all wisdom, that we may present every man perfect in Christ; whereunto I labor also, striving according to his working, which worketh in me mightily”;2 Tim. 1:14—“That good thing which was committed unto thee guard through the Holy Spirit which dwelleth in us.”Christianity substitutes for the old sources of excitement the power of the Holy Spirit. Here is a source of comfort, energy, and joy, infinitely superior to any which the sinner knows. God does not leave the soul to fall back upon itself. The higher up we get in the scale of being, the more does the new life need nursing and tending,—compare the sapling and the babe. God gives to the Christian, therefore, an abiding presence and work of the Holy Spirit,—not only regeneration, but sanctification. C. E. Smith, Baptism of Fire:“The soul needs the latter as well as the former rain, the sealing as well as the renewing of the Spirit, the baptism of fire as well as the baptism of water. Sealing gives something additional to the document, an evidence plainer than the writing within, both to one's self and to others.”“Few flowers yield more honey than serves the bee for its daily food.”So we must first live ourselves off from our spiritual diet; only what is over can be given to nourish others. Thomas à Kempis, Imitation of Christ:“Have peace in thine own heart; else thou wilt never be able to communicate peace to others.”Godet:“Man is a vessel destined to receive God, a vessel which must be enlarged in proportion as it is filled, and filled in proportion as it is enlarged.”Matthew Arnold, Morality:“We cannot kindle when we will The fire which in the heart resides; The Spirit bloweth and is still; In mystery our soul abides. But tasks in hours of insight willed Can be in hours of gloom fulfilled. With aching hands and bleeding feet, We dig and heap, lay stone on stone; We bear the burden and the heat Of the long day, and wish 't were done. Not till the hours of light return All we have built do we discern.”(f) The mediate or instrumental cause of sanctification, as of justification, is faith.[pg 873]Acts 15:9—“cleansing their hearts by faith”;Rom. 1:17—“For therein is revealed a righteousness of God from faith unto faith: as it is written, But the righteous shall live from faith.”The righteousness includes sanctification as well as justification; and the subject of the epistle to the Romans is not simply justification by faith, but rather righteousness by faith, or salvation by faith. Justification by faith is the subject ofchapters 1-7; sanctification by faith is the subject ofchapters 8-16. We are not sanctified by efforts of our own, any more than we are justified by efforts of our own.God does not share with us the glory of sanctification, any more than he shares with us the glory of justification. He must do all, or nothing. William Law:“A root set in the finest soil, in the best climate, and blessed with all that sun and air and rain can do for it, is not in so sure a way of its growth to perfection, as every man may be whose spirit aspires after all that which God is ready and infinitely desirous to give him. For the sun meets not the springing bud that stretches toward him with half that certainty as God, the source of all good, communicates himself to the soul that longs to partake of him.”(g) The object of this faith is Christ himself, as the head of a new humanity and the source of truth and life to those united to him.2 Cor. 3:18—“we all, with unveiled face, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are transformed into the same image from glory to glory, even as from the Lord the Spirit”;Eph. 4:13—“till we all attain unto the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a fullgrown man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ.”Faith here is of course much more than intellectual faith,—it is the reception of Christ himself. As Christianity furnishes a new source of life and energy—in the Holy Spirit: so it gives a new object of attention and regard—the Lord Jesus Christ. As we get air out of a vessel by pouring in water, so we can drive sin out only by bringing Christ in. See Chalmers' Sermon on The Expulsive Power of a New Affection. Drummond, Nat. Law in the Spir. World, 123-140—“Man does not grow by making efforts to grow, but by putting himself into the conditions of growth by living in Christ.”1 John 3:3—“every one that hath this hope set on him(ἐπ᾽ αὐτῷ)purifieth himself, even as he is pure.”Sanctification does not begin from within. The objective Savior must come first. The hope based on him must give the motive and the standard of self-purification. Likeness comes from liking. We grow to be like that which we like. Hence we use the phrase“I like,”as a synonym for“I love.”We cannot remove frost from our window by rubbing the pane; we need to kindle a fire. Growth is not the product of effort, but of life.“Taking thought,”or“being anxious”(Mat. 6:27), is not the way to grow. Only take the hindrances out of the way, and we grow without care, as the tree does. The moon makes no effort to shine, nor has it any power of its own to shine. It is only a burnt out cinder in the sky. It shines only as it reflects the light of the sun. So we can shine“as lights in the world”(Phil. 2:15), only as we reflect Christ, who is“the Sun of Righteousness”(Mal. 4:2) and“the Light of the world”(John 8:12).(h) Though the weakest faith perfectly justifies, the degree of sanctification is measured by the strength of the Christian's faith, and the persistence with which he apprehends Christ in the various relations which the Scriptures declare him to sustain to us.Mat. 9:29—“According to your faith be it done unto you”;Luke 17:5—“Lord, increase our faith”;Rom. 12:2—“be not fashioned according to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is the good and acceptable and perfect will of God”;13:14—“But put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh, to fulfil the lusts thereof”;Eph. 4:24—“put on the new man, that after God hath been created in righteousness and holiness of truth”;1 Tim. 4:7—“exercise thyself unto godliness.”Leighton:“None of the children of God are born dumb.”Milton:“Good, the more communicated, the more abundant grows.”Faith can neither be stationary nor complete (Westcott, Bible Com. onJohn 15:8—“so shall ye become my disciples”). Luther:“He whoisa Christian isnoChristian”;“Christianus non in esse, sed in fieri.”In a Bible that belonged to Oliver Cromwell is this inscription:“O. C. 1644. Qui cessat esse melior cessat esse bonus”—“He who ceases to be better ceases to be good.”Story, the sculptor, when asked which of his works he valued most, replied:“My next.”The greatest work of the Holy Spirit is the perfecting of Christian character.Col. 1:10—“Increasing by the knowledge of God”—here the instrumental dative represents the knowledge of God as the dew or rain which nurtures the growth of the plant (Lightfoot).[pg 874]Mr. Gladstone had the habit of reading the Bible every Sunday afternoon to old women on his estate. Tholuck:“I have but one passion, and that is Christ.”This is an echo of Paul's words:“to me to live is Christ”(Phil. 1:21). But Paul is far from thinking that he has already obtained, or is already made perfect. He prays“that I may gain Christ, ... that I may know him”(Phil. 3:8, 10).(i) From the lack of persistence in using the means appointed for Christian growth—such as the word of God, prayer, association with other believers, and personal effort for the conversion of the ungodly—sanctification does not always proceed in regular and unbroken course, and it is never completed in this life.Phil. 3:12—“Not that I have already obtained, or am already made perfect: but I press on, if so be that I may lay hold on that for which also I was laid hold on by Jesus Christ”;1 John 1:8—“If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.”Carlyle, in his Life of John Sterling, chap. 8, says of Coleridge, that“whenever natural obligation or voluntary undertaking made it his duty to do anything, the fact seemed a sufficient reason for hisnotdoing it.”A regular, advancing sanctification is marked, on the other hand, by a growing habit of instant and joyful obedience. The intermittent spring depends upon the reservoir in the mountain cave,—only when the rain fills the latter full, does the spring begin to flow. So to secure unbroken Christian activity, there must be constant reception of the word and Spirit of God.Galen:“If diseases take hold of the body, there is nothing so certain to drive them out as diligent exercise.”Williams, Principles of Medicine:“Want of exercise and sedentary habits not only predispose to, but actually cause, disease.”The little girl who fell out of bed at night was asked how it happened. She replied that she went to sleep too near where she got in. Some Christians lose the joy of their religion by ceasing their Christian activities too soon after conversion. Yet others cultivate their spiritual lives from mere selfishness. Selfishness follows the line of least resistance. It is easier to pray in public and to attend meetings for prayer, than it is to go out into the unsympathetic world and engage in the work of winning souls. This is the fault of monasticism. Those grow most who forget themselves in their work for others. The discipline of life is ordained in God's providence to correct tendencies to indolence. Even this discipline is often received in a rebellious spirit. The result is delay in the process of sanctification. Bengel:“Deus habet horas et moras”—“God has his hours and his delays.”German proverb:“Gut Ding will Weile haben”—“A good thing requires time.”(j) Sanctification, both of the soul and of the body of the believer, is completed in the life to come,—that of the former at death, that of the latter at the resurrection.Phil. 3:21—“who shall fashion anew the body of our humiliation, that it may be conformed to the body of his glory, according to the working whereby he is able even to subject all things unto himself”;Col. 3:4—“When Christ, who is our life, shall be manifested, then shall we also with him be manifested in glory”;Heb. 12:14, 23—“Follow after peace with all men, and the sanctification without which no man shall see the Lord ... spirits of just men made perfect”;1 John 3:2—“Beloved, now are we children of God, and it is not yet made manifest what we shall be. We know that, if he shall be manifested, we shall be like him; for we shall see him even as he is”;Jude 24—“able to guard you from stumbling, and to set you before the presence of his glory without blemish in exceeding joy”;Rev. 14:5—“And in their mouth was found no lie: they are without blemish.”A. J. Gordon, Ministry of the Spirit, 121, puts the completion of our sanctification, not at death, but at the appearing of the Lord“a second time, apart from sin, ... unto salvation”(Heb. 9:28; 1 Thess. 3:13; 5:23). When we shall see him as he is, instantaneous photographing of his image in our souls will take the place of the present slow progress from glory to glory (2 Cor. 3:18; 1 John 3:2). If by sanctification we mean, not a sloughing off of remaining depravity, but an ever increasing purity and perfection, then we may hold that the process of sanctification goes on forever. Our relation to Christ must always be that of the imperfect to the perfect, of the finite to the infinite; and for finite spirits, progress must always be possible. Clarke, Christian Theology, 373—“Not even at death can sanctification end.... The goal lies far beyond deliverance from sin.... There is no such thing as bringing the divine life to such completion that no further progress is possible to it.... Indeed, free and unhampered progress can scarcely begin until[pg 875]sin is left behind.”“O snows so pure, O peaks so high! I shall not reach you till I die!”As Jesus' resurrection was prepared by holiness of life, so the Christian's resurrection is prepared by sanctification. When our souls are freed from the last remains of sin, then it will not be possible for us to be holden by death (cf.Acts 2:24). See Gordon, The Twofold Life, or Christ's Work for us and in us; Brit. and For. Evang. Rev., April, 1884:205-229; Van Oosterzee, Christian Dogmatics, 657-662.

I. Sanctification.1. Definition of Sanctification.Sanctification is that continuous operation of the Holy Spirit, by which the holy disposition imparted in regeneration is maintained and strengthened.Godet:“The work of Jesus in the world is twofold. It is a work accomplishedfor us, destined to effectreconciliationbetween God and man; it is a work accomplishedin us, with the object of effecting oursanctification. By the one, a rightrelationis established between God and us; by the other, thefruitof the reëstablished order is secured. By the former, the condemned sinner is received into the state of grace; by the latter, the pardoned sinner is associated with the life of God.... How many express themselves as if, when forgiveness with the peace which it procures has been once obtained, all is finished and the work of salvation is complete! They seem to have no suspicion that salvation consists in the health of the soul, and that the health of the soul consists in holiness. Forgiveness is not the reëstablishment of health; it is the crisis of convalescence. If God thinks fit to declare the sinner righteous, it is in order that he may by that means restore him to holiness.”O. P. Gifford:“The steamship whose machinery is broken may be brought into port and made fast to the dock. She issafe, but notsound. Repairs may last a long time. Christ designs to make us both safe and sound. Justification gives the first—safety; sanctification gives the second—soundness.”Bradford, Heredity and Christian Problems, 220—“To be conscious that one is forgiven, and yet that at the same time he is so polluted that he cannot beget a child without handing on to that child a nature which will be as bad as if his father had never been forgiven, is not salvation in anyrealsense.”We would say: Is not salvation in anycompletesense. Justification needs sanctification to follow it. Man needs God to continue and preserve his spiritual life, just as much as he needed God to begin it at the first. Creation in the spiritual, as well as in the natural world, needs to be supplemented by preservation; see quotation from Jonathan Edwards, in Allen's biography of him, 371.Regeneration is instantaneous, but sanctification takes time. The“developing”of the photographer's picture may illustrate God's process of sanctifying the regenerate soul. But it is development by new access of truth or light, while the photographer's picture is usually developed in the dark. This development cannot be accomplished in a moment.“We try in our religious lives to practise instantaneous photography. One minute for prayer will give us a vision of God, and we think that is enough. Our pictures are poor because our negatives are weak. We do not give God a long enough sitting to get a good likeness.”Salvation is something past, something present, and something future; a past fact, justification; a present process, sanctification; a future consummation, redemption and glory. David, in Ps. 51:1, 2, prays not only that God will blot out his transgressions (justification), but that God will wash him thoroughly from his iniquity (sanctification). E. G. Robinson:“Sanctification consistsnegatively, in the removal of the penal consequences of sin from the moral nature;positively, in the progressive implanting and growth of a new principle of life.... The Christian church is a succession of copies of the character of Christ. Paul never says:‘be ye imitators of me’(1 Cor. 4:16), except when writing to those who had no copies of the New Testament or of the Gospels.”Clarke, Christian Theology, 366—“Sanctification does not mean perfection reached, but the progress of the divine life toward perfection. Sanctification is the Christianizing of the Christian.”It is not simply deliverance from the penalty of sin, but the development of a divine life that conquers sin. A. A. Hodge, Popular Lectures, 343—“Any man who thinks he is a Christian, and that he has accepted Christ for justification, when he did not at the same time accept him for sanctification, is miserably deluded in that very experience.”This definition implies:(a) That, although in regeneration the governing disposition of the soul is made holy, there still remain tendencies to evil which are unsubdued.John 13:10—“He that is bathed needeth not save to wash his feet, but is clean every whit[i. e., as a whole]”;Rom. 6:12—“Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body, that ye should obey the lusts thereof”—sindwells[pg 870]in a believer, but itreignsin an unbeliever (C. H. M.). Subordinate volitions in the Christian are not always determined in character by the fundamental choice; eddies in the stream sometimes run counter to the general course of the current.This doctrine is the opposite of that expressed in the phrase:“the essential divinity of the human.”Not culture, but crucifixion, is what the Holy Spirit prescribes for the natural man. There are two natures in the Christian, as Paul shows inRomans 7. The one flourishes at the other's expense. The vine dresser has to cut the rank shoots from self, that all our force may be thrown into growing fruit. Deadwood must be cut out; living wood must be cut back (John 15:2). Sanctification is not a matter of course, which will go on whatever we do, or do not do. It requires a direct superintendence and surgery on the one hand, and, on the other hand a practical hatred of evil on our part that coöperates with the husbandry of God.(b) That the existence in the believer of these two opposing principles gives rise to a conflict which lasts through life.Gal. 5:17—“For the flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh; for these are contrary the one to the other; that ye may not do the things that ye would”—not, as the A. V. had it,“so that ye cannot do the things that ye would”; the Spirit who dwells in believers is represented as enabling them successfully to resist those tendencies to evil which naturally exist within them;James 4:5(the marginal and better reading)—“That spirit which he made to dwell in us yearneth for us even unto jealous envy”—i. e., God's love, like all true love, longs to have its objects wholly for its own. The Christian is two men in one; but he is to“put away the old man”and“put on the new man”(Eph. 4:22, 23). Compare Ecclesiasticus 2:1—“My son, if thou dost set out to serve the Lord, prepare thy soul for temptation.”1 Tim. 6:12—“fight the good fight of the faith”—ἀγωνίζου τὸν καλὸν ἀγῶνα τῆς πίστεως = the beautiful, honorable, glorious fight; since it has a noble helper, incentive, and reward. It is the commonest of all struggles, but the issue determines our destiny. An Indian received as a gift some tobacco in which he found a half dollar hidden. He brought it back next day, saying that good Indian had fought all night with bad Indian, one telling him to keep, the other telling him to return.(c) That in this conflict the Holy Spirit enables the Christian, through increasing faith, more fully and consciously to appropriate Christ, and thus progressively to make conquest of the remaining sinfulness of his nature.Rom. 8:13, 14—“for if ye live after the flesh, ye must die; but if by the Spirit ye put to death the deeds of the body, ye shall live. For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, these are sons of God”;1 Cor. 6:11—“but ye were washed, but ye were sanctified, but ye were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, and in the Spirit of our God”;James 1:26—“If any man thinketh himself to be religious, while he bridleth not his tongue but deceiveth his heart, this man's religion is vain”—see Com. of Neander,in loco—“That religion is merely imaginary, seeming, unreal, which allows the continuance of the moral defects originally predominant in the character.”The Christian is“crucified with Christ”(Gal. 2:20); but the crucified man does not die at once. Yet he is as good as dead. Even after the old man is crucified we are still to mortify him, or put him to death (Rom. 8:13; Col. 3:5). We are to cut down the old rosebush and cultivate only the new shoot that is grafted into it. Here is our probation as Christians. So“die Scene wird zum Tribunal”—the play of life becomes God's judgment.Dr. Hastings:“When Bourdaloue was probing the conscience of Louis XIV, applying to him the words of St. Paul and intending to paraphrase them:‘For the good which I would, I do not, but the evil which I would not, that I do,’‘I find two men in me’—the King interrupted the great preacher with the memorable exclamation:‘Ah, these two men, I know them well!’Bourdaloue answered:‘It is already something toknowthem, Sire; but it is not enough,—one of the two must perish.’”And, in the genuine believer, the old does little by little die, and the new takes its place, as“David waxed stronger and stronger, but the house of Saul waxed weaker and weaker”(2 Sam. 3:1). As the Welsh minister found himself after awhile thinking and dreaming in English, so the language of Canaan becomes to the Christian his native and only speech.2. Explanations and Scripture Proof.(a) Sanctification is the work of God.1 Thess. 5:23—“And the God of peace himself sanctify you wholly.”Much of our modern literature ignores man's dependence upon God, and some of it seems distinctly intended to teach[pg 871]the opposite doctrine. Auerbach's“On the Heights,”for example, teaches that man can make his own atonement; and“The Villa on the Rhine,”by the same author, teaches that man can sanctify himself. The proper inscription for many modern French novels is:“Entertainment here for man and beast.”TheTendenznovelleof Germany has its imitators in the sceptical novels of England. And no doctrine in these novels is so common as the doctrine that man needs no Savior but himself.(b) It is a continuous process.Phil. 1:6—“being confident of this very thing, that he who began a good work in you will perfect it until the day of Jesus Christ”;3:15—“Let us therefore, as many as are perfect, be thus minded: and if in anything ye are otherwise minded, this also shall God reveal unto you”;Col. 3:9, 10—“lie not one to another; seeing that ye have put off the old man with his doings, and have put on the new man, that is being renewed unto knowledge after the image of him that created him”;cf.Acts 2:47—“those that were being saved”;1 Cor. 1:18—“unto us who are being saved”;2 Cor. 2:15—“in them that are being saved”;1 Thess. 2:12—“God, who calleth you into his own kingdom and glory.”C. H. Parkhurst:“The yeast does not strike through the whole lump of dough at a flash. We keep finding unsuspected lumps of meal that the yeast has not yet seized upon. We surrender to God in instalments. We may not mean to do it, but we do it. Conversion has got to be brought down to date.”A student asked the President of Oberlin College whether he could not take a shorter course than the one prescribed.“Oh yes,”replied the President,“but then it depends on what you want to make of yourself. When God wants to make an oak, he takes a hundred years, but when he wants to make a squash, he takes six months.”(c) It is distinguished from regeneration as growth from birth, or as the strengthening of a holy disposition from the original impartation of it.Eph. 4:15—“speaking the truth in love, may grow up in all things into him, who is the head, even Christ”;1 Thess. 3:12—“the Lord make you to increase and abound in love one toward another, and toward all men”;2 Pet. 3:18—“But grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ”;cf.1 Pet. 1:23—“begotten again, not of corruptible seed, but of incorruptible, through the word of God, which liveth and abideth”;1 John 3:9—“Whosoever is begotten of God doeth no sin, because his seed abideth in him: and he cannot sin, because he is begotten of God.”Not sin only, but holiness also, is a germ whose nature is to grow. The new love in the believer's heart follows the law of all life, in developing and extending itself under God's husbandry. George Eliot:“The reward of one duty done is the power to do another.”J. W. A. Stewart:“When the 21st of March has come, we say‘The back of the winter is broken.’There will still be alternations of frost, but the progress will be towards heat. The coming of summer is sure,—in germ the summer is already here.”Regeneration is the crisis of a disease; sanctification is the progress of convalescence.Yet growth is not a uniform thing in the tree or in the Christian. In some single months there is more growth than in all the year besides. During the rest of the year, however, there is solidification, without which the green timber would be useless. The period of rapid growth, when woody fibre is actually deposited between the bark and the trunk, occupies but four to six weeks in May, June, and July.2 Pet. 1:5—“adding on your part all diligence, in your faith supply virtue; and in your virtue knowledge”—adding to the central grace all those that are complementary and subordinate, till they attain the harmony of a chorus (ἐπιχορηγήσατε).(d) The operation of God reveals itself in, and is accompanied by, intelligent and voluntary activity of the believer in the discovery and mortification of sinful desires, and in the bringing of the whole being into obedience to Christ and conformity to the standards of his word.John 17:17—“Sanctify them in the truth: thy word is truth”;2 Cor. 10:5—“casting down imaginations, and every high thing that is exalted against the knowledge of God, and bringing every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ”;Phil. 2:12, 13—“work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God who worketh in you both to will and to work, for his good pleasure”;1 Pet. 2:2—“as new-born babes, long for the spiritual milk which is without guile, that ye may grow thereby unto salvation.”John 15:3—“Already ye are clean because of the word which I have spoken unto you.”Regeneration through the word is followed by sanctification through the word.Eph. 5:1—“Be ye therefore imitators of God, as beloved children.”Imitation is at first a painful effort of will, as in learning the piano; afterwards it becomes pleasurable and even unconscious. Children unconsciously imitate the handwriting of their parents. Charles Lamb sees in the mirror, as he is shaving, the apparition of his dead[pg 872]father. So our likeness to God comes out as we advance in years.Col. 3:4—“When Christ who is our life, shall be manifested, then shall ye also with him be manifested in glory.”Horace Bushnell said that, if the stars did not move, they would rot in the sky. The man who rides the bicycle must either go on, or go off. A large part of sanctification consists in the formation of proper habits, such as the habit of Scripture reading, of secret prayer, of church going, of efforts to convert and benefit others. Baxter:“Every man must grow, as trees grow, downward and upward at once. The visible outward growth must be accompanied by an invisible inward growth.”Drummond:“The spiritual man having passed from death to life, the natural man must pass from life to death.”There must be increasing sense of sin:“My sins gave sharpness to the nails, And pointed every thorn.”There must be a bringing of new and yet newer regions of thought, feeling, and action, under the sway of Christ and his truth. There is a grain of truth even in Macaulay's jest about“essentially Christian cookery.”A. J. Gordon, Ministry of the Spirit, 63, 109-111—“The church is Christian no more than as it is the organ of the continuous passion of Christ. We must suffer with sinning and lost humanity, and so‘fill up ... that which is lacking of the afflictions of Christ’(Col. 1:24). Christ's crucifixion must be prolonged side by side with his resurrection. There are three deaths: 1. death in sin, our natural condition; 2. death for sin, our judicial condition; 3. death to sin, our sanctified condition.... As the ascending sap in the tree crowds off the dead leaves which in spite of storm and frost cling to the branches all the winter long, so does the Holy Spirit within us, when allowed full sway, subdue and expel the remnants of our sinful nature.”(e) The agency through which God effects the sanctification of the believer is the indwelling Spirit of Christ.John 14:17, 18—“the Spirit of truth ... he abideth with you, and shall be in you. I will not leave you desolate; I come unto you”;15:3-5—“Already ye are clean.... Abide in me ... apart from me ye can do nothing”;Rom. 8:9, 10—“the Spirit of God dwelleth in you. But if any man hath not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of his. And if Christ is in you, the body is dead because of sin; but the spirit is life because of righteousness”;1 Cor. 1:2, 30—“sanctified in Christ Jesus ... Christ Jesus, who was made unto us ... sanctification”;6:19—“know ye not that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit which is in you, which ye have from God?”Gal. 5:16—“Walk by the Spirit, and ye shall not fulfil the lust of the flesh”;Eph. 5:18—“And be not drunken with wine, wherein is riot, but be filled with the Spirit”;Col. 1:27-29—“the riches of the glory of this mystery among the Gentiles, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory: whom we proclaim, admonishing every man and teaching every man in all wisdom, that we may present every man perfect in Christ; whereunto I labor also, striving according to his working, which worketh in me mightily”;2 Tim. 1:14—“That good thing which was committed unto thee guard through the Holy Spirit which dwelleth in us.”Christianity substitutes for the old sources of excitement the power of the Holy Spirit. Here is a source of comfort, energy, and joy, infinitely superior to any which the sinner knows. God does not leave the soul to fall back upon itself. The higher up we get in the scale of being, the more does the new life need nursing and tending,—compare the sapling and the babe. God gives to the Christian, therefore, an abiding presence and work of the Holy Spirit,—not only regeneration, but sanctification. C. E. Smith, Baptism of Fire:“The soul needs the latter as well as the former rain, the sealing as well as the renewing of the Spirit, the baptism of fire as well as the baptism of water. Sealing gives something additional to the document, an evidence plainer than the writing within, both to one's self and to others.”“Few flowers yield more honey than serves the bee for its daily food.”So we must first live ourselves off from our spiritual diet; only what is over can be given to nourish others. Thomas à Kempis, Imitation of Christ:“Have peace in thine own heart; else thou wilt never be able to communicate peace to others.”Godet:“Man is a vessel destined to receive God, a vessel which must be enlarged in proportion as it is filled, and filled in proportion as it is enlarged.”Matthew Arnold, Morality:“We cannot kindle when we will The fire which in the heart resides; The Spirit bloweth and is still; In mystery our soul abides. But tasks in hours of insight willed Can be in hours of gloom fulfilled. With aching hands and bleeding feet, We dig and heap, lay stone on stone; We bear the burden and the heat Of the long day, and wish 't were done. Not till the hours of light return All we have built do we discern.”(f) The mediate or instrumental cause of sanctification, as of justification, is faith.[pg 873]Acts 15:9—“cleansing their hearts by faith”;Rom. 1:17—“For therein is revealed a righteousness of God from faith unto faith: as it is written, But the righteous shall live from faith.”The righteousness includes sanctification as well as justification; and the subject of the epistle to the Romans is not simply justification by faith, but rather righteousness by faith, or salvation by faith. Justification by faith is the subject ofchapters 1-7; sanctification by faith is the subject ofchapters 8-16. We are not sanctified by efforts of our own, any more than we are justified by efforts of our own.God does not share with us the glory of sanctification, any more than he shares with us the glory of justification. He must do all, or nothing. William Law:“A root set in the finest soil, in the best climate, and blessed with all that sun and air and rain can do for it, is not in so sure a way of its growth to perfection, as every man may be whose spirit aspires after all that which God is ready and infinitely desirous to give him. For the sun meets not the springing bud that stretches toward him with half that certainty as God, the source of all good, communicates himself to the soul that longs to partake of him.”(g) The object of this faith is Christ himself, as the head of a new humanity and the source of truth and life to those united to him.2 Cor. 3:18—“we all, with unveiled face, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are transformed into the same image from glory to glory, even as from the Lord the Spirit”;Eph. 4:13—“till we all attain unto the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a fullgrown man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ.”Faith here is of course much more than intellectual faith,—it is the reception of Christ himself. As Christianity furnishes a new source of life and energy—in the Holy Spirit: so it gives a new object of attention and regard—the Lord Jesus Christ. As we get air out of a vessel by pouring in water, so we can drive sin out only by bringing Christ in. See Chalmers' Sermon on The Expulsive Power of a New Affection. Drummond, Nat. Law in the Spir. World, 123-140—“Man does not grow by making efforts to grow, but by putting himself into the conditions of growth by living in Christ.”1 John 3:3—“every one that hath this hope set on him(ἐπ᾽ αὐτῷ)purifieth himself, even as he is pure.”Sanctification does not begin from within. The objective Savior must come first. The hope based on him must give the motive and the standard of self-purification. Likeness comes from liking. We grow to be like that which we like. Hence we use the phrase“I like,”as a synonym for“I love.”We cannot remove frost from our window by rubbing the pane; we need to kindle a fire. Growth is not the product of effort, but of life.“Taking thought,”or“being anxious”(Mat. 6:27), is not the way to grow. Only take the hindrances out of the way, and we grow without care, as the tree does. The moon makes no effort to shine, nor has it any power of its own to shine. It is only a burnt out cinder in the sky. It shines only as it reflects the light of the sun. So we can shine“as lights in the world”(Phil. 2:15), only as we reflect Christ, who is“the Sun of Righteousness”(Mal. 4:2) and“the Light of the world”(John 8:12).(h) Though the weakest faith perfectly justifies, the degree of sanctification is measured by the strength of the Christian's faith, and the persistence with which he apprehends Christ in the various relations which the Scriptures declare him to sustain to us.Mat. 9:29—“According to your faith be it done unto you”;Luke 17:5—“Lord, increase our faith”;Rom. 12:2—“be not fashioned according to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is the good and acceptable and perfect will of God”;13:14—“But put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh, to fulfil the lusts thereof”;Eph. 4:24—“put on the new man, that after God hath been created in righteousness and holiness of truth”;1 Tim. 4:7—“exercise thyself unto godliness.”Leighton:“None of the children of God are born dumb.”Milton:“Good, the more communicated, the more abundant grows.”Faith can neither be stationary nor complete (Westcott, Bible Com. onJohn 15:8—“so shall ye become my disciples”). Luther:“He whoisa Christian isnoChristian”;“Christianus non in esse, sed in fieri.”In a Bible that belonged to Oliver Cromwell is this inscription:“O. C. 1644. Qui cessat esse melior cessat esse bonus”—“He who ceases to be better ceases to be good.”Story, the sculptor, when asked which of his works he valued most, replied:“My next.”The greatest work of the Holy Spirit is the perfecting of Christian character.Col. 1:10—“Increasing by the knowledge of God”—here the instrumental dative represents the knowledge of God as the dew or rain which nurtures the growth of the plant (Lightfoot).[pg 874]Mr. Gladstone had the habit of reading the Bible every Sunday afternoon to old women on his estate. Tholuck:“I have but one passion, and that is Christ.”This is an echo of Paul's words:“to me to live is Christ”(Phil. 1:21). But Paul is far from thinking that he has already obtained, or is already made perfect. He prays“that I may gain Christ, ... that I may know him”(Phil. 3:8, 10).(i) From the lack of persistence in using the means appointed for Christian growth—such as the word of God, prayer, association with other believers, and personal effort for the conversion of the ungodly—sanctification does not always proceed in regular and unbroken course, and it is never completed in this life.Phil. 3:12—“Not that I have already obtained, or am already made perfect: but I press on, if so be that I may lay hold on that for which also I was laid hold on by Jesus Christ”;1 John 1:8—“If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.”Carlyle, in his Life of John Sterling, chap. 8, says of Coleridge, that“whenever natural obligation or voluntary undertaking made it his duty to do anything, the fact seemed a sufficient reason for hisnotdoing it.”A regular, advancing sanctification is marked, on the other hand, by a growing habit of instant and joyful obedience. The intermittent spring depends upon the reservoir in the mountain cave,—only when the rain fills the latter full, does the spring begin to flow. So to secure unbroken Christian activity, there must be constant reception of the word and Spirit of God.Galen:“If diseases take hold of the body, there is nothing so certain to drive them out as diligent exercise.”Williams, Principles of Medicine:“Want of exercise and sedentary habits not only predispose to, but actually cause, disease.”The little girl who fell out of bed at night was asked how it happened. She replied that she went to sleep too near where she got in. Some Christians lose the joy of their religion by ceasing their Christian activities too soon after conversion. Yet others cultivate their spiritual lives from mere selfishness. Selfishness follows the line of least resistance. It is easier to pray in public and to attend meetings for prayer, than it is to go out into the unsympathetic world and engage in the work of winning souls. This is the fault of monasticism. Those grow most who forget themselves in their work for others. The discipline of life is ordained in God's providence to correct tendencies to indolence. Even this discipline is often received in a rebellious spirit. The result is delay in the process of sanctification. Bengel:“Deus habet horas et moras”—“God has his hours and his delays.”German proverb:“Gut Ding will Weile haben”—“A good thing requires time.”(j) Sanctification, both of the soul and of the body of the believer, is completed in the life to come,—that of the former at death, that of the latter at the resurrection.Phil. 3:21—“who shall fashion anew the body of our humiliation, that it may be conformed to the body of his glory, according to the working whereby he is able even to subject all things unto himself”;Col. 3:4—“When Christ, who is our life, shall be manifested, then shall we also with him be manifested in glory”;Heb. 12:14, 23—“Follow after peace with all men, and the sanctification without which no man shall see the Lord ... spirits of just men made perfect”;1 John 3:2—“Beloved, now are we children of God, and it is not yet made manifest what we shall be. We know that, if he shall be manifested, we shall be like him; for we shall see him even as he is”;Jude 24—“able to guard you from stumbling, and to set you before the presence of his glory without blemish in exceeding joy”;Rev. 14:5—“And in their mouth was found no lie: they are without blemish.”A. J. Gordon, Ministry of the Spirit, 121, puts the completion of our sanctification, not at death, but at the appearing of the Lord“a second time, apart from sin, ... unto salvation”(Heb. 9:28; 1 Thess. 3:13; 5:23). When we shall see him as he is, instantaneous photographing of his image in our souls will take the place of the present slow progress from glory to glory (2 Cor. 3:18; 1 John 3:2). If by sanctification we mean, not a sloughing off of remaining depravity, but an ever increasing purity and perfection, then we may hold that the process of sanctification goes on forever. Our relation to Christ must always be that of the imperfect to the perfect, of the finite to the infinite; and for finite spirits, progress must always be possible. Clarke, Christian Theology, 373—“Not even at death can sanctification end.... The goal lies far beyond deliverance from sin.... There is no such thing as bringing the divine life to such completion that no further progress is possible to it.... Indeed, free and unhampered progress can scarcely begin until[pg 875]sin is left behind.”“O snows so pure, O peaks so high! I shall not reach you till I die!”As Jesus' resurrection was prepared by holiness of life, so the Christian's resurrection is prepared by sanctification. When our souls are freed from the last remains of sin, then it will not be possible for us to be holden by death (cf.Acts 2:24). See Gordon, The Twofold Life, or Christ's Work for us and in us; Brit. and For. Evang. Rev., April, 1884:205-229; Van Oosterzee, Christian Dogmatics, 657-662.

I. Sanctification.1. Definition of Sanctification.Sanctification is that continuous operation of the Holy Spirit, by which the holy disposition imparted in regeneration is maintained and strengthened.Godet:“The work of Jesus in the world is twofold. It is a work accomplishedfor us, destined to effectreconciliationbetween God and man; it is a work accomplishedin us, with the object of effecting oursanctification. By the one, a rightrelationis established between God and us; by the other, thefruitof the reëstablished order is secured. By the former, the condemned sinner is received into the state of grace; by the latter, the pardoned sinner is associated with the life of God.... How many express themselves as if, when forgiveness with the peace which it procures has been once obtained, all is finished and the work of salvation is complete! They seem to have no suspicion that salvation consists in the health of the soul, and that the health of the soul consists in holiness. Forgiveness is not the reëstablishment of health; it is the crisis of convalescence. If God thinks fit to declare the sinner righteous, it is in order that he may by that means restore him to holiness.”O. P. Gifford:“The steamship whose machinery is broken may be brought into port and made fast to the dock. She issafe, but notsound. Repairs may last a long time. Christ designs to make us both safe and sound. Justification gives the first—safety; sanctification gives the second—soundness.”Bradford, Heredity and Christian Problems, 220—“To be conscious that one is forgiven, and yet that at the same time he is so polluted that he cannot beget a child without handing on to that child a nature which will be as bad as if his father had never been forgiven, is not salvation in anyrealsense.”We would say: Is not salvation in anycompletesense. Justification needs sanctification to follow it. Man needs God to continue and preserve his spiritual life, just as much as he needed God to begin it at the first. Creation in the spiritual, as well as in the natural world, needs to be supplemented by preservation; see quotation from Jonathan Edwards, in Allen's biography of him, 371.Regeneration is instantaneous, but sanctification takes time. The“developing”of the photographer's picture may illustrate God's process of sanctifying the regenerate soul. But it is development by new access of truth or light, while the photographer's picture is usually developed in the dark. This development cannot be accomplished in a moment.“We try in our religious lives to practise instantaneous photography. One minute for prayer will give us a vision of God, and we think that is enough. Our pictures are poor because our negatives are weak. We do not give God a long enough sitting to get a good likeness.”Salvation is something past, something present, and something future; a past fact, justification; a present process, sanctification; a future consummation, redemption and glory. David, in Ps. 51:1, 2, prays not only that God will blot out his transgressions (justification), but that God will wash him thoroughly from his iniquity (sanctification). E. G. Robinson:“Sanctification consistsnegatively, in the removal of the penal consequences of sin from the moral nature;positively, in the progressive implanting and growth of a new principle of life.... The Christian church is a succession of copies of the character of Christ. Paul never says:‘be ye imitators of me’(1 Cor. 4:16), except when writing to those who had no copies of the New Testament or of the Gospels.”Clarke, Christian Theology, 366—“Sanctification does not mean perfection reached, but the progress of the divine life toward perfection. Sanctification is the Christianizing of the Christian.”It is not simply deliverance from the penalty of sin, but the development of a divine life that conquers sin. A. A. Hodge, Popular Lectures, 343—“Any man who thinks he is a Christian, and that he has accepted Christ for justification, when he did not at the same time accept him for sanctification, is miserably deluded in that very experience.”This definition implies:(a) That, although in regeneration the governing disposition of the soul is made holy, there still remain tendencies to evil which are unsubdued.John 13:10—“He that is bathed needeth not save to wash his feet, but is clean every whit[i. e., as a whole]”;Rom. 6:12—“Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body, that ye should obey the lusts thereof”—sindwells[pg 870]in a believer, but itreignsin an unbeliever (C. H. M.). Subordinate volitions in the Christian are not always determined in character by the fundamental choice; eddies in the stream sometimes run counter to the general course of the current.This doctrine is the opposite of that expressed in the phrase:“the essential divinity of the human.”Not culture, but crucifixion, is what the Holy Spirit prescribes for the natural man. There are two natures in the Christian, as Paul shows inRomans 7. The one flourishes at the other's expense. The vine dresser has to cut the rank shoots from self, that all our force may be thrown into growing fruit. Deadwood must be cut out; living wood must be cut back (John 15:2). Sanctification is not a matter of course, which will go on whatever we do, or do not do. It requires a direct superintendence and surgery on the one hand, and, on the other hand a practical hatred of evil on our part that coöperates with the husbandry of God.(b) That the existence in the believer of these two opposing principles gives rise to a conflict which lasts through life.Gal. 5:17—“For the flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh; for these are contrary the one to the other; that ye may not do the things that ye would”—not, as the A. V. had it,“so that ye cannot do the things that ye would”; the Spirit who dwells in believers is represented as enabling them successfully to resist those tendencies to evil which naturally exist within them;James 4:5(the marginal and better reading)—“That spirit which he made to dwell in us yearneth for us even unto jealous envy”—i. e., God's love, like all true love, longs to have its objects wholly for its own. The Christian is two men in one; but he is to“put away the old man”and“put on the new man”(Eph. 4:22, 23). Compare Ecclesiasticus 2:1—“My son, if thou dost set out to serve the Lord, prepare thy soul for temptation.”1 Tim. 6:12—“fight the good fight of the faith”—ἀγωνίζου τὸν καλὸν ἀγῶνα τῆς πίστεως = the beautiful, honorable, glorious fight; since it has a noble helper, incentive, and reward. It is the commonest of all struggles, but the issue determines our destiny. An Indian received as a gift some tobacco in which he found a half dollar hidden. He brought it back next day, saying that good Indian had fought all night with bad Indian, one telling him to keep, the other telling him to return.(c) That in this conflict the Holy Spirit enables the Christian, through increasing faith, more fully and consciously to appropriate Christ, and thus progressively to make conquest of the remaining sinfulness of his nature.Rom. 8:13, 14—“for if ye live after the flesh, ye must die; but if by the Spirit ye put to death the deeds of the body, ye shall live. For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, these are sons of God”;1 Cor. 6:11—“but ye were washed, but ye were sanctified, but ye were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, and in the Spirit of our God”;James 1:26—“If any man thinketh himself to be religious, while he bridleth not his tongue but deceiveth his heart, this man's religion is vain”—see Com. of Neander,in loco—“That religion is merely imaginary, seeming, unreal, which allows the continuance of the moral defects originally predominant in the character.”The Christian is“crucified with Christ”(Gal. 2:20); but the crucified man does not die at once. Yet he is as good as dead. Even after the old man is crucified we are still to mortify him, or put him to death (Rom. 8:13; Col. 3:5). We are to cut down the old rosebush and cultivate only the new shoot that is grafted into it. Here is our probation as Christians. So“die Scene wird zum Tribunal”—the play of life becomes God's judgment.Dr. Hastings:“When Bourdaloue was probing the conscience of Louis XIV, applying to him the words of St. Paul and intending to paraphrase them:‘For the good which I would, I do not, but the evil which I would not, that I do,’‘I find two men in me’—the King interrupted the great preacher with the memorable exclamation:‘Ah, these two men, I know them well!’Bourdaloue answered:‘It is already something toknowthem, Sire; but it is not enough,—one of the two must perish.’”And, in the genuine believer, the old does little by little die, and the new takes its place, as“David waxed stronger and stronger, but the house of Saul waxed weaker and weaker”(2 Sam. 3:1). As the Welsh minister found himself after awhile thinking and dreaming in English, so the language of Canaan becomes to the Christian his native and only speech.2. Explanations and Scripture Proof.(a) Sanctification is the work of God.1 Thess. 5:23—“And the God of peace himself sanctify you wholly.”Much of our modern literature ignores man's dependence upon God, and some of it seems distinctly intended to teach[pg 871]the opposite doctrine. Auerbach's“On the Heights,”for example, teaches that man can make his own atonement; and“The Villa on the Rhine,”by the same author, teaches that man can sanctify himself. The proper inscription for many modern French novels is:“Entertainment here for man and beast.”TheTendenznovelleof Germany has its imitators in the sceptical novels of England. And no doctrine in these novels is so common as the doctrine that man needs no Savior but himself.(b) It is a continuous process.Phil. 1:6—“being confident of this very thing, that he who began a good work in you will perfect it until the day of Jesus Christ”;3:15—“Let us therefore, as many as are perfect, be thus minded: and if in anything ye are otherwise minded, this also shall God reveal unto you”;Col. 3:9, 10—“lie not one to another; seeing that ye have put off the old man with his doings, and have put on the new man, that is being renewed unto knowledge after the image of him that created him”;cf.Acts 2:47—“those that were being saved”;1 Cor. 1:18—“unto us who are being saved”;2 Cor. 2:15—“in them that are being saved”;1 Thess. 2:12—“God, who calleth you into his own kingdom and glory.”C. H. Parkhurst:“The yeast does not strike through the whole lump of dough at a flash. We keep finding unsuspected lumps of meal that the yeast has not yet seized upon. We surrender to God in instalments. We may not mean to do it, but we do it. Conversion has got to be brought down to date.”A student asked the President of Oberlin College whether he could not take a shorter course than the one prescribed.“Oh yes,”replied the President,“but then it depends on what you want to make of yourself. When God wants to make an oak, he takes a hundred years, but when he wants to make a squash, he takes six months.”(c) It is distinguished from regeneration as growth from birth, or as the strengthening of a holy disposition from the original impartation of it.Eph. 4:15—“speaking the truth in love, may grow up in all things into him, who is the head, even Christ”;1 Thess. 3:12—“the Lord make you to increase and abound in love one toward another, and toward all men”;2 Pet. 3:18—“But grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ”;cf.1 Pet. 1:23—“begotten again, not of corruptible seed, but of incorruptible, through the word of God, which liveth and abideth”;1 John 3:9—“Whosoever is begotten of God doeth no sin, because his seed abideth in him: and he cannot sin, because he is begotten of God.”Not sin only, but holiness also, is a germ whose nature is to grow. The new love in the believer's heart follows the law of all life, in developing and extending itself under God's husbandry. George Eliot:“The reward of one duty done is the power to do another.”J. W. A. Stewart:“When the 21st of March has come, we say‘The back of the winter is broken.’There will still be alternations of frost, but the progress will be towards heat. The coming of summer is sure,—in germ the summer is already here.”Regeneration is the crisis of a disease; sanctification is the progress of convalescence.Yet growth is not a uniform thing in the tree or in the Christian. In some single months there is more growth than in all the year besides. During the rest of the year, however, there is solidification, without which the green timber would be useless. The period of rapid growth, when woody fibre is actually deposited between the bark and the trunk, occupies but four to six weeks in May, June, and July.2 Pet. 1:5—“adding on your part all diligence, in your faith supply virtue; and in your virtue knowledge”—adding to the central grace all those that are complementary and subordinate, till they attain the harmony of a chorus (ἐπιχορηγήσατε).(d) The operation of God reveals itself in, and is accompanied by, intelligent and voluntary activity of the believer in the discovery and mortification of sinful desires, and in the bringing of the whole being into obedience to Christ and conformity to the standards of his word.John 17:17—“Sanctify them in the truth: thy word is truth”;2 Cor. 10:5—“casting down imaginations, and every high thing that is exalted against the knowledge of God, and bringing every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ”;Phil. 2:12, 13—“work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God who worketh in you both to will and to work, for his good pleasure”;1 Pet. 2:2—“as new-born babes, long for the spiritual milk which is without guile, that ye may grow thereby unto salvation.”John 15:3—“Already ye are clean because of the word which I have spoken unto you.”Regeneration through the word is followed by sanctification through the word.Eph. 5:1—“Be ye therefore imitators of God, as beloved children.”Imitation is at first a painful effort of will, as in learning the piano; afterwards it becomes pleasurable and even unconscious. Children unconsciously imitate the handwriting of their parents. Charles Lamb sees in the mirror, as he is shaving, the apparition of his dead[pg 872]father. So our likeness to God comes out as we advance in years.Col. 3:4—“When Christ who is our life, shall be manifested, then shall ye also with him be manifested in glory.”Horace Bushnell said that, if the stars did not move, they would rot in the sky. The man who rides the bicycle must either go on, or go off. A large part of sanctification consists in the formation of proper habits, such as the habit of Scripture reading, of secret prayer, of church going, of efforts to convert and benefit others. Baxter:“Every man must grow, as trees grow, downward and upward at once. The visible outward growth must be accompanied by an invisible inward growth.”Drummond:“The spiritual man having passed from death to life, the natural man must pass from life to death.”There must be increasing sense of sin:“My sins gave sharpness to the nails, And pointed every thorn.”There must be a bringing of new and yet newer regions of thought, feeling, and action, under the sway of Christ and his truth. There is a grain of truth even in Macaulay's jest about“essentially Christian cookery.”A. J. Gordon, Ministry of the Spirit, 63, 109-111—“The church is Christian no more than as it is the organ of the continuous passion of Christ. We must suffer with sinning and lost humanity, and so‘fill up ... that which is lacking of the afflictions of Christ’(Col. 1:24). Christ's crucifixion must be prolonged side by side with his resurrection. There are three deaths: 1. death in sin, our natural condition; 2. death for sin, our judicial condition; 3. death to sin, our sanctified condition.... As the ascending sap in the tree crowds off the dead leaves which in spite of storm and frost cling to the branches all the winter long, so does the Holy Spirit within us, when allowed full sway, subdue and expel the remnants of our sinful nature.”(e) The agency through which God effects the sanctification of the believer is the indwelling Spirit of Christ.John 14:17, 18—“the Spirit of truth ... he abideth with you, and shall be in you. I will not leave you desolate; I come unto you”;15:3-5—“Already ye are clean.... Abide in me ... apart from me ye can do nothing”;Rom. 8:9, 10—“the Spirit of God dwelleth in you. But if any man hath not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of his. And if Christ is in you, the body is dead because of sin; but the spirit is life because of righteousness”;1 Cor. 1:2, 30—“sanctified in Christ Jesus ... Christ Jesus, who was made unto us ... sanctification”;6:19—“know ye not that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit which is in you, which ye have from God?”Gal. 5:16—“Walk by the Spirit, and ye shall not fulfil the lust of the flesh”;Eph. 5:18—“And be not drunken with wine, wherein is riot, but be filled with the Spirit”;Col. 1:27-29—“the riches of the glory of this mystery among the Gentiles, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory: whom we proclaim, admonishing every man and teaching every man in all wisdom, that we may present every man perfect in Christ; whereunto I labor also, striving according to his working, which worketh in me mightily”;2 Tim. 1:14—“That good thing which was committed unto thee guard through the Holy Spirit which dwelleth in us.”Christianity substitutes for the old sources of excitement the power of the Holy Spirit. Here is a source of comfort, energy, and joy, infinitely superior to any which the sinner knows. God does not leave the soul to fall back upon itself. The higher up we get in the scale of being, the more does the new life need nursing and tending,—compare the sapling and the babe. God gives to the Christian, therefore, an abiding presence and work of the Holy Spirit,—not only regeneration, but sanctification. C. E. Smith, Baptism of Fire:“The soul needs the latter as well as the former rain, the sealing as well as the renewing of the Spirit, the baptism of fire as well as the baptism of water. Sealing gives something additional to the document, an evidence plainer than the writing within, both to one's self and to others.”“Few flowers yield more honey than serves the bee for its daily food.”So we must first live ourselves off from our spiritual diet; only what is over can be given to nourish others. Thomas à Kempis, Imitation of Christ:“Have peace in thine own heart; else thou wilt never be able to communicate peace to others.”Godet:“Man is a vessel destined to receive God, a vessel which must be enlarged in proportion as it is filled, and filled in proportion as it is enlarged.”Matthew Arnold, Morality:“We cannot kindle when we will The fire which in the heart resides; The Spirit bloweth and is still; In mystery our soul abides. But tasks in hours of insight willed Can be in hours of gloom fulfilled. With aching hands and bleeding feet, We dig and heap, lay stone on stone; We bear the burden and the heat Of the long day, and wish 't were done. Not till the hours of light return All we have built do we discern.”(f) The mediate or instrumental cause of sanctification, as of justification, is faith.[pg 873]Acts 15:9—“cleansing their hearts by faith”;Rom. 1:17—“For therein is revealed a righteousness of God from faith unto faith: as it is written, But the righteous shall live from faith.”The righteousness includes sanctification as well as justification; and the subject of the epistle to the Romans is not simply justification by faith, but rather righteousness by faith, or salvation by faith. Justification by faith is the subject ofchapters 1-7; sanctification by faith is the subject ofchapters 8-16. We are not sanctified by efforts of our own, any more than we are justified by efforts of our own.God does not share with us the glory of sanctification, any more than he shares with us the glory of justification. He must do all, or nothing. William Law:“A root set in the finest soil, in the best climate, and blessed with all that sun and air and rain can do for it, is not in so sure a way of its growth to perfection, as every man may be whose spirit aspires after all that which God is ready and infinitely desirous to give him. For the sun meets not the springing bud that stretches toward him with half that certainty as God, the source of all good, communicates himself to the soul that longs to partake of him.”(g) The object of this faith is Christ himself, as the head of a new humanity and the source of truth and life to those united to him.2 Cor. 3:18—“we all, with unveiled face, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are transformed into the same image from glory to glory, even as from the Lord the Spirit”;Eph. 4:13—“till we all attain unto the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a fullgrown man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ.”Faith here is of course much more than intellectual faith,—it is the reception of Christ himself. As Christianity furnishes a new source of life and energy—in the Holy Spirit: so it gives a new object of attention and regard—the Lord Jesus Christ. As we get air out of a vessel by pouring in water, so we can drive sin out only by bringing Christ in. See Chalmers' Sermon on The Expulsive Power of a New Affection. Drummond, Nat. Law in the Spir. World, 123-140—“Man does not grow by making efforts to grow, but by putting himself into the conditions of growth by living in Christ.”1 John 3:3—“every one that hath this hope set on him(ἐπ᾽ αὐτῷ)purifieth himself, even as he is pure.”Sanctification does not begin from within. The objective Savior must come first. The hope based on him must give the motive and the standard of self-purification. Likeness comes from liking. We grow to be like that which we like. Hence we use the phrase“I like,”as a synonym for“I love.”We cannot remove frost from our window by rubbing the pane; we need to kindle a fire. Growth is not the product of effort, but of life.“Taking thought,”or“being anxious”(Mat. 6:27), is not the way to grow. Only take the hindrances out of the way, and we grow without care, as the tree does. The moon makes no effort to shine, nor has it any power of its own to shine. It is only a burnt out cinder in the sky. It shines only as it reflects the light of the sun. So we can shine“as lights in the world”(Phil. 2:15), only as we reflect Christ, who is“the Sun of Righteousness”(Mal. 4:2) and“the Light of the world”(John 8:12).(h) Though the weakest faith perfectly justifies, the degree of sanctification is measured by the strength of the Christian's faith, and the persistence with which he apprehends Christ in the various relations which the Scriptures declare him to sustain to us.Mat. 9:29—“According to your faith be it done unto you”;Luke 17:5—“Lord, increase our faith”;Rom. 12:2—“be not fashioned according to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is the good and acceptable and perfect will of God”;13:14—“But put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh, to fulfil the lusts thereof”;Eph. 4:24—“put on the new man, that after God hath been created in righteousness and holiness of truth”;1 Tim. 4:7—“exercise thyself unto godliness.”Leighton:“None of the children of God are born dumb.”Milton:“Good, the more communicated, the more abundant grows.”Faith can neither be stationary nor complete (Westcott, Bible Com. onJohn 15:8—“so shall ye become my disciples”). Luther:“He whoisa Christian isnoChristian”;“Christianus non in esse, sed in fieri.”In a Bible that belonged to Oliver Cromwell is this inscription:“O. C. 1644. Qui cessat esse melior cessat esse bonus”—“He who ceases to be better ceases to be good.”Story, the sculptor, when asked which of his works he valued most, replied:“My next.”The greatest work of the Holy Spirit is the perfecting of Christian character.Col. 1:10—“Increasing by the knowledge of God”—here the instrumental dative represents the knowledge of God as the dew or rain which nurtures the growth of the plant (Lightfoot).[pg 874]Mr. Gladstone had the habit of reading the Bible every Sunday afternoon to old women on his estate. Tholuck:“I have but one passion, and that is Christ.”This is an echo of Paul's words:“to me to live is Christ”(Phil. 1:21). But Paul is far from thinking that he has already obtained, or is already made perfect. He prays“that I may gain Christ, ... that I may know him”(Phil. 3:8, 10).(i) From the lack of persistence in using the means appointed for Christian growth—such as the word of God, prayer, association with other believers, and personal effort for the conversion of the ungodly—sanctification does not always proceed in regular and unbroken course, and it is never completed in this life.Phil. 3:12—“Not that I have already obtained, or am already made perfect: but I press on, if so be that I may lay hold on that for which also I was laid hold on by Jesus Christ”;1 John 1:8—“If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.”Carlyle, in his Life of John Sterling, chap. 8, says of Coleridge, that“whenever natural obligation or voluntary undertaking made it his duty to do anything, the fact seemed a sufficient reason for hisnotdoing it.”A regular, advancing sanctification is marked, on the other hand, by a growing habit of instant and joyful obedience. The intermittent spring depends upon the reservoir in the mountain cave,—only when the rain fills the latter full, does the spring begin to flow. So to secure unbroken Christian activity, there must be constant reception of the word and Spirit of God.Galen:“If diseases take hold of the body, there is nothing so certain to drive them out as diligent exercise.”Williams, Principles of Medicine:“Want of exercise and sedentary habits not only predispose to, but actually cause, disease.”The little girl who fell out of bed at night was asked how it happened. She replied that she went to sleep too near where she got in. Some Christians lose the joy of their religion by ceasing their Christian activities too soon after conversion. Yet others cultivate their spiritual lives from mere selfishness. Selfishness follows the line of least resistance. It is easier to pray in public and to attend meetings for prayer, than it is to go out into the unsympathetic world and engage in the work of winning souls. This is the fault of monasticism. Those grow most who forget themselves in their work for others. The discipline of life is ordained in God's providence to correct tendencies to indolence. Even this discipline is often received in a rebellious spirit. The result is delay in the process of sanctification. Bengel:“Deus habet horas et moras”—“God has his hours and his delays.”German proverb:“Gut Ding will Weile haben”—“A good thing requires time.”(j) Sanctification, both of the soul and of the body of the believer, is completed in the life to come,—that of the former at death, that of the latter at the resurrection.Phil. 3:21—“who shall fashion anew the body of our humiliation, that it may be conformed to the body of his glory, according to the working whereby he is able even to subject all things unto himself”;Col. 3:4—“When Christ, who is our life, shall be manifested, then shall we also with him be manifested in glory”;Heb. 12:14, 23—“Follow after peace with all men, and the sanctification without which no man shall see the Lord ... spirits of just men made perfect”;1 John 3:2—“Beloved, now are we children of God, and it is not yet made manifest what we shall be. We know that, if he shall be manifested, we shall be like him; for we shall see him even as he is”;Jude 24—“able to guard you from stumbling, and to set you before the presence of his glory without blemish in exceeding joy”;Rev. 14:5—“And in their mouth was found no lie: they are without blemish.”A. J. Gordon, Ministry of the Spirit, 121, puts the completion of our sanctification, not at death, but at the appearing of the Lord“a second time, apart from sin, ... unto salvation”(Heb. 9:28; 1 Thess. 3:13; 5:23). When we shall see him as he is, instantaneous photographing of his image in our souls will take the place of the present slow progress from glory to glory (2 Cor. 3:18; 1 John 3:2). If by sanctification we mean, not a sloughing off of remaining depravity, but an ever increasing purity and perfection, then we may hold that the process of sanctification goes on forever. Our relation to Christ must always be that of the imperfect to the perfect, of the finite to the infinite; and for finite spirits, progress must always be possible. Clarke, Christian Theology, 373—“Not even at death can sanctification end.... The goal lies far beyond deliverance from sin.... There is no such thing as bringing the divine life to such completion that no further progress is possible to it.... Indeed, free and unhampered progress can scarcely begin until[pg 875]sin is left behind.”“O snows so pure, O peaks so high! I shall not reach you till I die!”As Jesus' resurrection was prepared by holiness of life, so the Christian's resurrection is prepared by sanctification. When our souls are freed from the last remains of sin, then it will not be possible for us to be holden by death (cf.Acts 2:24). See Gordon, The Twofold Life, or Christ's Work for us and in us; Brit. and For. Evang. Rev., April, 1884:205-229; Van Oosterzee, Christian Dogmatics, 657-662.

I. Sanctification.1. Definition of Sanctification.Sanctification is that continuous operation of the Holy Spirit, by which the holy disposition imparted in regeneration is maintained and strengthened.Godet:“The work of Jesus in the world is twofold. It is a work accomplishedfor us, destined to effectreconciliationbetween God and man; it is a work accomplishedin us, with the object of effecting oursanctification. By the one, a rightrelationis established between God and us; by the other, thefruitof the reëstablished order is secured. By the former, the condemned sinner is received into the state of grace; by the latter, the pardoned sinner is associated with the life of God.... How many express themselves as if, when forgiveness with the peace which it procures has been once obtained, all is finished and the work of salvation is complete! They seem to have no suspicion that salvation consists in the health of the soul, and that the health of the soul consists in holiness. Forgiveness is not the reëstablishment of health; it is the crisis of convalescence. If God thinks fit to declare the sinner righteous, it is in order that he may by that means restore him to holiness.”O. P. Gifford:“The steamship whose machinery is broken may be brought into port and made fast to the dock. She issafe, but notsound. Repairs may last a long time. Christ designs to make us both safe and sound. Justification gives the first—safety; sanctification gives the second—soundness.”Bradford, Heredity and Christian Problems, 220—“To be conscious that one is forgiven, and yet that at the same time he is so polluted that he cannot beget a child without handing on to that child a nature which will be as bad as if his father had never been forgiven, is not salvation in anyrealsense.”We would say: Is not salvation in anycompletesense. Justification needs sanctification to follow it. Man needs God to continue and preserve his spiritual life, just as much as he needed God to begin it at the first. Creation in the spiritual, as well as in the natural world, needs to be supplemented by preservation; see quotation from Jonathan Edwards, in Allen's biography of him, 371.Regeneration is instantaneous, but sanctification takes time. The“developing”of the photographer's picture may illustrate God's process of sanctifying the regenerate soul. But it is development by new access of truth or light, while the photographer's picture is usually developed in the dark. This development cannot be accomplished in a moment.“We try in our religious lives to practise instantaneous photography. One minute for prayer will give us a vision of God, and we think that is enough. Our pictures are poor because our negatives are weak. We do not give God a long enough sitting to get a good likeness.”Salvation is something past, something present, and something future; a past fact, justification; a present process, sanctification; a future consummation, redemption and glory. David, in Ps. 51:1, 2, prays not only that God will blot out his transgressions (justification), but that God will wash him thoroughly from his iniquity (sanctification). E. G. Robinson:“Sanctification consistsnegatively, in the removal of the penal consequences of sin from the moral nature;positively, in the progressive implanting and growth of a new principle of life.... The Christian church is a succession of copies of the character of Christ. Paul never says:‘be ye imitators of me’(1 Cor. 4:16), except when writing to those who had no copies of the New Testament or of the Gospels.”Clarke, Christian Theology, 366—“Sanctification does not mean perfection reached, but the progress of the divine life toward perfection. Sanctification is the Christianizing of the Christian.”It is not simply deliverance from the penalty of sin, but the development of a divine life that conquers sin. A. A. Hodge, Popular Lectures, 343—“Any man who thinks he is a Christian, and that he has accepted Christ for justification, when he did not at the same time accept him for sanctification, is miserably deluded in that very experience.”This definition implies:(a) That, although in regeneration the governing disposition of the soul is made holy, there still remain tendencies to evil which are unsubdued.John 13:10—“He that is bathed needeth not save to wash his feet, but is clean every whit[i. e., as a whole]”;Rom. 6:12—“Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body, that ye should obey the lusts thereof”—sindwells[pg 870]in a believer, but itreignsin an unbeliever (C. H. M.). Subordinate volitions in the Christian are not always determined in character by the fundamental choice; eddies in the stream sometimes run counter to the general course of the current.This doctrine is the opposite of that expressed in the phrase:“the essential divinity of the human.”Not culture, but crucifixion, is what the Holy Spirit prescribes for the natural man. There are two natures in the Christian, as Paul shows inRomans 7. The one flourishes at the other's expense. The vine dresser has to cut the rank shoots from self, that all our force may be thrown into growing fruit. Deadwood must be cut out; living wood must be cut back (John 15:2). Sanctification is not a matter of course, which will go on whatever we do, or do not do. It requires a direct superintendence and surgery on the one hand, and, on the other hand a practical hatred of evil on our part that coöperates with the husbandry of God.(b) That the existence in the believer of these two opposing principles gives rise to a conflict which lasts through life.Gal. 5:17—“For the flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh; for these are contrary the one to the other; that ye may not do the things that ye would”—not, as the A. V. had it,“so that ye cannot do the things that ye would”; the Spirit who dwells in believers is represented as enabling them successfully to resist those tendencies to evil which naturally exist within them;James 4:5(the marginal and better reading)—“That spirit which he made to dwell in us yearneth for us even unto jealous envy”—i. e., God's love, like all true love, longs to have its objects wholly for its own. The Christian is two men in one; but he is to“put away the old man”and“put on the new man”(Eph. 4:22, 23). Compare Ecclesiasticus 2:1—“My son, if thou dost set out to serve the Lord, prepare thy soul for temptation.”1 Tim. 6:12—“fight the good fight of the faith”—ἀγωνίζου τὸν καλὸν ἀγῶνα τῆς πίστεως = the beautiful, honorable, glorious fight; since it has a noble helper, incentive, and reward. It is the commonest of all struggles, but the issue determines our destiny. An Indian received as a gift some tobacco in which he found a half dollar hidden. He brought it back next day, saying that good Indian had fought all night with bad Indian, one telling him to keep, the other telling him to return.(c) That in this conflict the Holy Spirit enables the Christian, through increasing faith, more fully and consciously to appropriate Christ, and thus progressively to make conquest of the remaining sinfulness of his nature.Rom. 8:13, 14—“for if ye live after the flesh, ye must die; but if by the Spirit ye put to death the deeds of the body, ye shall live. For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, these are sons of God”;1 Cor. 6:11—“but ye were washed, but ye were sanctified, but ye were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, and in the Spirit of our God”;James 1:26—“If any man thinketh himself to be religious, while he bridleth not his tongue but deceiveth his heart, this man's religion is vain”—see Com. of Neander,in loco—“That religion is merely imaginary, seeming, unreal, which allows the continuance of the moral defects originally predominant in the character.”The Christian is“crucified with Christ”(Gal. 2:20); but the crucified man does not die at once. Yet he is as good as dead. Even after the old man is crucified we are still to mortify him, or put him to death (Rom. 8:13; Col. 3:5). We are to cut down the old rosebush and cultivate only the new shoot that is grafted into it. Here is our probation as Christians. So“die Scene wird zum Tribunal”—the play of life becomes God's judgment.Dr. Hastings:“When Bourdaloue was probing the conscience of Louis XIV, applying to him the words of St. Paul and intending to paraphrase them:‘For the good which I would, I do not, but the evil which I would not, that I do,’‘I find two men in me’—the King interrupted the great preacher with the memorable exclamation:‘Ah, these two men, I know them well!’Bourdaloue answered:‘It is already something toknowthem, Sire; but it is not enough,—one of the two must perish.’”And, in the genuine believer, the old does little by little die, and the new takes its place, as“David waxed stronger and stronger, but the house of Saul waxed weaker and weaker”(2 Sam. 3:1). As the Welsh minister found himself after awhile thinking and dreaming in English, so the language of Canaan becomes to the Christian his native and only speech.2. Explanations and Scripture Proof.(a) Sanctification is the work of God.1 Thess. 5:23—“And the God of peace himself sanctify you wholly.”Much of our modern literature ignores man's dependence upon God, and some of it seems distinctly intended to teach[pg 871]the opposite doctrine. Auerbach's“On the Heights,”for example, teaches that man can make his own atonement; and“The Villa on the Rhine,”by the same author, teaches that man can sanctify himself. The proper inscription for many modern French novels is:“Entertainment here for man and beast.”TheTendenznovelleof Germany has its imitators in the sceptical novels of England. And no doctrine in these novels is so common as the doctrine that man needs no Savior but himself.(b) It is a continuous process.Phil. 1:6—“being confident of this very thing, that he who began a good work in you will perfect it until the day of Jesus Christ”;3:15—“Let us therefore, as many as are perfect, be thus minded: and if in anything ye are otherwise minded, this also shall God reveal unto you”;Col. 3:9, 10—“lie not one to another; seeing that ye have put off the old man with his doings, and have put on the new man, that is being renewed unto knowledge after the image of him that created him”;cf.Acts 2:47—“those that were being saved”;1 Cor. 1:18—“unto us who are being saved”;2 Cor. 2:15—“in them that are being saved”;1 Thess. 2:12—“God, who calleth you into his own kingdom and glory.”C. H. Parkhurst:“The yeast does not strike through the whole lump of dough at a flash. We keep finding unsuspected lumps of meal that the yeast has not yet seized upon. We surrender to God in instalments. We may not mean to do it, but we do it. Conversion has got to be brought down to date.”A student asked the President of Oberlin College whether he could not take a shorter course than the one prescribed.“Oh yes,”replied the President,“but then it depends on what you want to make of yourself. When God wants to make an oak, he takes a hundred years, but when he wants to make a squash, he takes six months.”(c) It is distinguished from regeneration as growth from birth, or as the strengthening of a holy disposition from the original impartation of it.Eph. 4:15—“speaking the truth in love, may grow up in all things into him, who is the head, even Christ”;1 Thess. 3:12—“the Lord make you to increase and abound in love one toward another, and toward all men”;2 Pet. 3:18—“But grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ”;cf.1 Pet. 1:23—“begotten again, not of corruptible seed, but of incorruptible, through the word of God, which liveth and abideth”;1 John 3:9—“Whosoever is begotten of God doeth no sin, because his seed abideth in him: and he cannot sin, because he is begotten of God.”Not sin only, but holiness also, is a germ whose nature is to grow. The new love in the believer's heart follows the law of all life, in developing and extending itself under God's husbandry. George Eliot:“The reward of one duty done is the power to do another.”J. W. A. Stewart:“When the 21st of March has come, we say‘The back of the winter is broken.’There will still be alternations of frost, but the progress will be towards heat. The coming of summer is sure,—in germ the summer is already here.”Regeneration is the crisis of a disease; sanctification is the progress of convalescence.Yet growth is not a uniform thing in the tree or in the Christian. In some single months there is more growth than in all the year besides. During the rest of the year, however, there is solidification, without which the green timber would be useless. The period of rapid growth, when woody fibre is actually deposited between the bark and the trunk, occupies but four to six weeks in May, June, and July.2 Pet. 1:5—“adding on your part all diligence, in your faith supply virtue; and in your virtue knowledge”—adding to the central grace all those that are complementary and subordinate, till they attain the harmony of a chorus (ἐπιχορηγήσατε).(d) The operation of God reveals itself in, and is accompanied by, intelligent and voluntary activity of the believer in the discovery and mortification of sinful desires, and in the bringing of the whole being into obedience to Christ and conformity to the standards of his word.John 17:17—“Sanctify them in the truth: thy word is truth”;2 Cor. 10:5—“casting down imaginations, and every high thing that is exalted against the knowledge of God, and bringing every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ”;Phil. 2:12, 13—“work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God who worketh in you both to will and to work, for his good pleasure”;1 Pet. 2:2—“as new-born babes, long for the spiritual milk which is without guile, that ye may grow thereby unto salvation.”John 15:3—“Already ye are clean because of the word which I have spoken unto you.”Regeneration through the word is followed by sanctification through the word.Eph. 5:1—“Be ye therefore imitators of God, as beloved children.”Imitation is at first a painful effort of will, as in learning the piano; afterwards it becomes pleasurable and even unconscious. Children unconsciously imitate the handwriting of their parents. Charles Lamb sees in the mirror, as he is shaving, the apparition of his dead[pg 872]father. So our likeness to God comes out as we advance in years.Col. 3:4—“When Christ who is our life, shall be manifested, then shall ye also with him be manifested in glory.”Horace Bushnell said that, if the stars did not move, they would rot in the sky. The man who rides the bicycle must either go on, or go off. A large part of sanctification consists in the formation of proper habits, such as the habit of Scripture reading, of secret prayer, of church going, of efforts to convert and benefit others. Baxter:“Every man must grow, as trees grow, downward and upward at once. The visible outward growth must be accompanied by an invisible inward growth.”Drummond:“The spiritual man having passed from death to life, the natural man must pass from life to death.”There must be increasing sense of sin:“My sins gave sharpness to the nails, And pointed every thorn.”There must be a bringing of new and yet newer regions of thought, feeling, and action, under the sway of Christ and his truth. There is a grain of truth even in Macaulay's jest about“essentially Christian cookery.”A. J. Gordon, Ministry of the Spirit, 63, 109-111—“The church is Christian no more than as it is the organ of the continuous passion of Christ. We must suffer with sinning and lost humanity, and so‘fill up ... that which is lacking of the afflictions of Christ’(Col. 1:24). Christ's crucifixion must be prolonged side by side with his resurrection. There are three deaths: 1. death in sin, our natural condition; 2. death for sin, our judicial condition; 3. death to sin, our sanctified condition.... As the ascending sap in the tree crowds off the dead leaves which in spite of storm and frost cling to the branches all the winter long, so does the Holy Spirit within us, when allowed full sway, subdue and expel the remnants of our sinful nature.”(e) The agency through which God effects the sanctification of the believer is the indwelling Spirit of Christ.John 14:17, 18—“the Spirit of truth ... he abideth with you, and shall be in you. I will not leave you desolate; I come unto you”;15:3-5—“Already ye are clean.... Abide in me ... apart from me ye can do nothing”;Rom. 8:9, 10—“the Spirit of God dwelleth in you. But if any man hath not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of his. And if Christ is in you, the body is dead because of sin; but the spirit is life because of righteousness”;1 Cor. 1:2, 30—“sanctified in Christ Jesus ... Christ Jesus, who was made unto us ... sanctification”;6:19—“know ye not that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit which is in you, which ye have from God?”Gal. 5:16—“Walk by the Spirit, and ye shall not fulfil the lust of the flesh”;Eph. 5:18—“And be not drunken with wine, wherein is riot, but be filled with the Spirit”;Col. 1:27-29—“the riches of the glory of this mystery among the Gentiles, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory: whom we proclaim, admonishing every man and teaching every man in all wisdom, that we may present every man perfect in Christ; whereunto I labor also, striving according to his working, which worketh in me mightily”;2 Tim. 1:14—“That good thing which was committed unto thee guard through the Holy Spirit which dwelleth in us.”Christianity substitutes for the old sources of excitement the power of the Holy Spirit. Here is a source of comfort, energy, and joy, infinitely superior to any which the sinner knows. God does not leave the soul to fall back upon itself. The higher up we get in the scale of being, the more does the new life need nursing and tending,—compare the sapling and the babe. God gives to the Christian, therefore, an abiding presence and work of the Holy Spirit,—not only regeneration, but sanctification. C. E. Smith, Baptism of Fire:“The soul needs the latter as well as the former rain, the sealing as well as the renewing of the Spirit, the baptism of fire as well as the baptism of water. Sealing gives something additional to the document, an evidence plainer than the writing within, both to one's self and to others.”“Few flowers yield more honey than serves the bee for its daily food.”So we must first live ourselves off from our spiritual diet; only what is over can be given to nourish others. Thomas à Kempis, Imitation of Christ:“Have peace in thine own heart; else thou wilt never be able to communicate peace to others.”Godet:“Man is a vessel destined to receive God, a vessel which must be enlarged in proportion as it is filled, and filled in proportion as it is enlarged.”Matthew Arnold, Morality:“We cannot kindle when we will The fire which in the heart resides; The Spirit bloweth and is still; In mystery our soul abides. But tasks in hours of insight willed Can be in hours of gloom fulfilled. With aching hands and bleeding feet, We dig and heap, lay stone on stone; We bear the burden and the heat Of the long day, and wish 't were done. Not till the hours of light return All we have built do we discern.”(f) The mediate or instrumental cause of sanctification, as of justification, is faith.[pg 873]Acts 15:9—“cleansing their hearts by faith”;Rom. 1:17—“For therein is revealed a righteousness of God from faith unto faith: as it is written, But the righteous shall live from faith.”The righteousness includes sanctification as well as justification; and the subject of the epistle to the Romans is not simply justification by faith, but rather righteousness by faith, or salvation by faith. Justification by faith is the subject ofchapters 1-7; sanctification by faith is the subject ofchapters 8-16. We are not sanctified by efforts of our own, any more than we are justified by efforts of our own.God does not share with us the glory of sanctification, any more than he shares with us the glory of justification. He must do all, or nothing. William Law:“A root set in the finest soil, in the best climate, and blessed with all that sun and air and rain can do for it, is not in so sure a way of its growth to perfection, as every man may be whose spirit aspires after all that which God is ready and infinitely desirous to give him. For the sun meets not the springing bud that stretches toward him with half that certainty as God, the source of all good, communicates himself to the soul that longs to partake of him.”(g) The object of this faith is Christ himself, as the head of a new humanity and the source of truth and life to those united to him.2 Cor. 3:18—“we all, with unveiled face, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are transformed into the same image from glory to glory, even as from the Lord the Spirit”;Eph. 4:13—“till we all attain unto the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a fullgrown man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ.”Faith here is of course much more than intellectual faith,—it is the reception of Christ himself. As Christianity furnishes a new source of life and energy—in the Holy Spirit: so it gives a new object of attention and regard—the Lord Jesus Christ. As we get air out of a vessel by pouring in water, so we can drive sin out only by bringing Christ in. See Chalmers' Sermon on The Expulsive Power of a New Affection. Drummond, Nat. Law in the Spir. World, 123-140—“Man does not grow by making efforts to grow, but by putting himself into the conditions of growth by living in Christ.”1 John 3:3—“every one that hath this hope set on him(ἐπ᾽ αὐτῷ)purifieth himself, even as he is pure.”Sanctification does not begin from within. The objective Savior must come first. The hope based on him must give the motive and the standard of self-purification. Likeness comes from liking. We grow to be like that which we like. Hence we use the phrase“I like,”as a synonym for“I love.”We cannot remove frost from our window by rubbing the pane; we need to kindle a fire. Growth is not the product of effort, but of life.“Taking thought,”or“being anxious”(Mat. 6:27), is not the way to grow. Only take the hindrances out of the way, and we grow without care, as the tree does. The moon makes no effort to shine, nor has it any power of its own to shine. It is only a burnt out cinder in the sky. It shines only as it reflects the light of the sun. So we can shine“as lights in the world”(Phil. 2:15), only as we reflect Christ, who is“the Sun of Righteousness”(Mal. 4:2) and“the Light of the world”(John 8:12).(h) Though the weakest faith perfectly justifies, the degree of sanctification is measured by the strength of the Christian's faith, and the persistence with which he apprehends Christ in the various relations which the Scriptures declare him to sustain to us.Mat. 9:29—“According to your faith be it done unto you”;Luke 17:5—“Lord, increase our faith”;Rom. 12:2—“be not fashioned according to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is the good and acceptable and perfect will of God”;13:14—“But put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh, to fulfil the lusts thereof”;Eph. 4:24—“put on the new man, that after God hath been created in righteousness and holiness of truth”;1 Tim. 4:7—“exercise thyself unto godliness.”Leighton:“None of the children of God are born dumb.”Milton:“Good, the more communicated, the more abundant grows.”Faith can neither be stationary nor complete (Westcott, Bible Com. onJohn 15:8—“so shall ye become my disciples”). Luther:“He whoisa Christian isnoChristian”;“Christianus non in esse, sed in fieri.”In a Bible that belonged to Oliver Cromwell is this inscription:“O. C. 1644. Qui cessat esse melior cessat esse bonus”—“He who ceases to be better ceases to be good.”Story, the sculptor, when asked which of his works he valued most, replied:“My next.”The greatest work of the Holy Spirit is the perfecting of Christian character.Col. 1:10—“Increasing by the knowledge of God”—here the instrumental dative represents the knowledge of God as the dew or rain which nurtures the growth of the plant (Lightfoot).[pg 874]Mr. Gladstone had the habit of reading the Bible every Sunday afternoon to old women on his estate. Tholuck:“I have but one passion, and that is Christ.”This is an echo of Paul's words:“to me to live is Christ”(Phil. 1:21). But Paul is far from thinking that he has already obtained, or is already made perfect. He prays“that I may gain Christ, ... that I may know him”(Phil. 3:8, 10).(i) From the lack of persistence in using the means appointed for Christian growth—such as the word of God, prayer, association with other believers, and personal effort for the conversion of the ungodly—sanctification does not always proceed in regular and unbroken course, and it is never completed in this life.Phil. 3:12—“Not that I have already obtained, or am already made perfect: but I press on, if so be that I may lay hold on that for which also I was laid hold on by Jesus Christ”;1 John 1:8—“If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.”Carlyle, in his Life of John Sterling, chap. 8, says of Coleridge, that“whenever natural obligation or voluntary undertaking made it his duty to do anything, the fact seemed a sufficient reason for hisnotdoing it.”A regular, advancing sanctification is marked, on the other hand, by a growing habit of instant and joyful obedience. The intermittent spring depends upon the reservoir in the mountain cave,—only when the rain fills the latter full, does the spring begin to flow. So to secure unbroken Christian activity, there must be constant reception of the word and Spirit of God.Galen:“If diseases take hold of the body, there is nothing so certain to drive them out as diligent exercise.”Williams, Principles of Medicine:“Want of exercise and sedentary habits not only predispose to, but actually cause, disease.”The little girl who fell out of bed at night was asked how it happened. She replied that she went to sleep too near where she got in. Some Christians lose the joy of their religion by ceasing their Christian activities too soon after conversion. Yet others cultivate their spiritual lives from mere selfishness. Selfishness follows the line of least resistance. It is easier to pray in public and to attend meetings for prayer, than it is to go out into the unsympathetic world and engage in the work of winning souls. This is the fault of monasticism. Those grow most who forget themselves in their work for others. The discipline of life is ordained in God's providence to correct tendencies to indolence. Even this discipline is often received in a rebellious spirit. The result is delay in the process of sanctification. Bengel:“Deus habet horas et moras”—“God has his hours and his delays.”German proverb:“Gut Ding will Weile haben”—“A good thing requires time.”(j) Sanctification, both of the soul and of the body of the believer, is completed in the life to come,—that of the former at death, that of the latter at the resurrection.Phil. 3:21—“who shall fashion anew the body of our humiliation, that it may be conformed to the body of his glory, according to the working whereby he is able even to subject all things unto himself”;Col. 3:4—“When Christ, who is our life, shall be manifested, then shall we also with him be manifested in glory”;Heb. 12:14, 23—“Follow after peace with all men, and the sanctification without which no man shall see the Lord ... spirits of just men made perfect”;1 John 3:2—“Beloved, now are we children of God, and it is not yet made manifest what we shall be. We know that, if he shall be manifested, we shall be like him; for we shall see him even as he is”;Jude 24—“able to guard you from stumbling, and to set you before the presence of his glory without blemish in exceeding joy”;Rev. 14:5—“And in their mouth was found no lie: they are without blemish.”A. J. Gordon, Ministry of the Spirit, 121, puts the completion of our sanctification, not at death, but at the appearing of the Lord“a second time, apart from sin, ... unto salvation”(Heb. 9:28; 1 Thess. 3:13; 5:23). When we shall see him as he is, instantaneous photographing of his image in our souls will take the place of the present slow progress from glory to glory (2 Cor. 3:18; 1 John 3:2). If by sanctification we mean, not a sloughing off of remaining depravity, but an ever increasing purity and perfection, then we may hold that the process of sanctification goes on forever. Our relation to Christ must always be that of the imperfect to the perfect, of the finite to the infinite; and for finite spirits, progress must always be possible. Clarke, Christian Theology, 373—“Not even at death can sanctification end.... The goal lies far beyond deliverance from sin.... There is no such thing as bringing the divine life to such completion that no further progress is possible to it.... Indeed, free and unhampered progress can scarcely begin until[pg 875]sin is left behind.”“O snows so pure, O peaks so high! I shall not reach you till I die!”As Jesus' resurrection was prepared by holiness of life, so the Christian's resurrection is prepared by sanctification. When our souls are freed from the last remains of sin, then it will not be possible for us to be holden by death (cf.Acts 2:24). See Gordon, The Twofold Life, or Christ's Work for us and in us; Brit. and For. Evang. Rev., April, 1884:205-229; Van Oosterzee, Christian Dogmatics, 657-662.

I. Sanctification.1. Definition of Sanctification.Sanctification is that continuous operation of the Holy Spirit, by which the holy disposition imparted in regeneration is maintained and strengthened.Godet:“The work of Jesus in the world is twofold. It is a work accomplishedfor us, destined to effectreconciliationbetween God and man; it is a work accomplishedin us, with the object of effecting oursanctification. By the one, a rightrelationis established between God and us; by the other, thefruitof the reëstablished order is secured. By the former, the condemned sinner is received into the state of grace; by the latter, the pardoned sinner is associated with the life of God.... How many express themselves as if, when forgiveness with the peace which it procures has been once obtained, all is finished and the work of salvation is complete! They seem to have no suspicion that salvation consists in the health of the soul, and that the health of the soul consists in holiness. Forgiveness is not the reëstablishment of health; it is the crisis of convalescence. If God thinks fit to declare the sinner righteous, it is in order that he may by that means restore him to holiness.”O. P. Gifford:“The steamship whose machinery is broken may be brought into port and made fast to the dock. She issafe, but notsound. Repairs may last a long time. Christ designs to make us both safe and sound. Justification gives the first—safety; sanctification gives the second—soundness.”Bradford, Heredity and Christian Problems, 220—“To be conscious that one is forgiven, and yet that at the same time he is so polluted that he cannot beget a child without handing on to that child a nature which will be as bad as if his father had never been forgiven, is not salvation in anyrealsense.”We would say: Is not salvation in anycompletesense. Justification needs sanctification to follow it. Man needs God to continue and preserve his spiritual life, just as much as he needed God to begin it at the first. Creation in the spiritual, as well as in the natural world, needs to be supplemented by preservation; see quotation from Jonathan Edwards, in Allen's biography of him, 371.Regeneration is instantaneous, but sanctification takes time. The“developing”of the photographer's picture may illustrate God's process of sanctifying the regenerate soul. But it is development by new access of truth or light, while the photographer's picture is usually developed in the dark. This development cannot be accomplished in a moment.“We try in our religious lives to practise instantaneous photography. One minute for prayer will give us a vision of God, and we think that is enough. Our pictures are poor because our negatives are weak. We do not give God a long enough sitting to get a good likeness.”Salvation is something past, something present, and something future; a past fact, justification; a present process, sanctification; a future consummation, redemption and glory. David, in Ps. 51:1, 2, prays not only that God will blot out his transgressions (justification), but that God will wash him thoroughly from his iniquity (sanctification). E. G. Robinson:“Sanctification consistsnegatively, in the removal of the penal consequences of sin from the moral nature;positively, in the progressive implanting and growth of a new principle of life.... The Christian church is a succession of copies of the character of Christ. Paul never says:‘be ye imitators of me’(1 Cor. 4:16), except when writing to those who had no copies of the New Testament or of the Gospels.”Clarke, Christian Theology, 366—“Sanctification does not mean perfection reached, but the progress of the divine life toward perfection. Sanctification is the Christianizing of the Christian.”It is not simply deliverance from the penalty of sin, but the development of a divine life that conquers sin. A. A. Hodge, Popular Lectures, 343—“Any man who thinks he is a Christian, and that he has accepted Christ for justification, when he did not at the same time accept him for sanctification, is miserably deluded in that very experience.”This definition implies:(a) That, although in regeneration the governing disposition of the soul is made holy, there still remain tendencies to evil which are unsubdued.John 13:10—“He that is bathed needeth not save to wash his feet, but is clean every whit[i. e., as a whole]”;Rom. 6:12—“Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body, that ye should obey the lusts thereof”—sindwells[pg 870]in a believer, but itreignsin an unbeliever (C. H. M.). Subordinate volitions in the Christian are not always determined in character by the fundamental choice; eddies in the stream sometimes run counter to the general course of the current.This doctrine is the opposite of that expressed in the phrase:“the essential divinity of the human.”Not culture, but crucifixion, is what the Holy Spirit prescribes for the natural man. There are two natures in the Christian, as Paul shows inRomans 7. The one flourishes at the other's expense. The vine dresser has to cut the rank shoots from self, that all our force may be thrown into growing fruit. Deadwood must be cut out; living wood must be cut back (John 15:2). Sanctification is not a matter of course, which will go on whatever we do, or do not do. It requires a direct superintendence and surgery on the one hand, and, on the other hand a practical hatred of evil on our part that coöperates with the husbandry of God.(b) That the existence in the believer of these two opposing principles gives rise to a conflict which lasts through life.Gal. 5:17—“For the flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh; for these are contrary the one to the other; that ye may not do the things that ye would”—not, as the A. V. had it,“so that ye cannot do the things that ye would”; the Spirit who dwells in believers is represented as enabling them successfully to resist those tendencies to evil which naturally exist within them;James 4:5(the marginal and better reading)—“That spirit which he made to dwell in us yearneth for us even unto jealous envy”—i. e., God's love, like all true love, longs to have its objects wholly for its own. The Christian is two men in one; but he is to“put away the old man”and“put on the new man”(Eph. 4:22, 23). Compare Ecclesiasticus 2:1—“My son, if thou dost set out to serve the Lord, prepare thy soul for temptation.”1 Tim. 6:12—“fight the good fight of the faith”—ἀγωνίζου τὸν καλὸν ἀγῶνα τῆς πίστεως = the beautiful, honorable, glorious fight; since it has a noble helper, incentive, and reward. It is the commonest of all struggles, but the issue determines our destiny. An Indian received as a gift some tobacco in which he found a half dollar hidden. He brought it back next day, saying that good Indian had fought all night with bad Indian, one telling him to keep, the other telling him to return.(c) That in this conflict the Holy Spirit enables the Christian, through increasing faith, more fully and consciously to appropriate Christ, and thus progressively to make conquest of the remaining sinfulness of his nature.Rom. 8:13, 14—“for if ye live after the flesh, ye must die; but if by the Spirit ye put to death the deeds of the body, ye shall live. For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, these are sons of God”;1 Cor. 6:11—“but ye were washed, but ye were sanctified, but ye were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, and in the Spirit of our God”;James 1:26—“If any man thinketh himself to be religious, while he bridleth not his tongue but deceiveth his heart, this man's religion is vain”—see Com. of Neander,in loco—“That religion is merely imaginary, seeming, unreal, which allows the continuance of the moral defects originally predominant in the character.”The Christian is“crucified with Christ”(Gal. 2:20); but the crucified man does not die at once. Yet he is as good as dead. Even after the old man is crucified we are still to mortify him, or put him to death (Rom. 8:13; Col. 3:5). We are to cut down the old rosebush and cultivate only the new shoot that is grafted into it. Here is our probation as Christians. So“die Scene wird zum Tribunal”—the play of life becomes God's judgment.Dr. Hastings:“When Bourdaloue was probing the conscience of Louis XIV, applying to him the words of St. Paul and intending to paraphrase them:‘For the good which I would, I do not, but the evil which I would not, that I do,’‘I find two men in me’—the King interrupted the great preacher with the memorable exclamation:‘Ah, these two men, I know them well!’Bourdaloue answered:‘It is already something toknowthem, Sire; but it is not enough,—one of the two must perish.’”And, in the genuine believer, the old does little by little die, and the new takes its place, as“David waxed stronger and stronger, but the house of Saul waxed weaker and weaker”(2 Sam. 3:1). As the Welsh minister found himself after awhile thinking and dreaming in English, so the language of Canaan becomes to the Christian his native and only speech.2. Explanations and Scripture Proof.(a) Sanctification is the work of God.1 Thess. 5:23—“And the God of peace himself sanctify you wholly.”Much of our modern literature ignores man's dependence upon God, and some of it seems distinctly intended to teach[pg 871]the opposite doctrine. Auerbach's“On the Heights,”for example, teaches that man can make his own atonement; and“The Villa on the Rhine,”by the same author, teaches that man can sanctify himself. The proper inscription for many modern French novels is:“Entertainment here for man and beast.”TheTendenznovelleof Germany has its imitators in the sceptical novels of England. And no doctrine in these novels is so common as the doctrine that man needs no Savior but himself.(b) It is a continuous process.Phil. 1:6—“being confident of this very thing, that he who began a good work in you will perfect it until the day of Jesus Christ”;3:15—“Let us therefore, as many as are perfect, be thus minded: and if in anything ye are otherwise minded, this also shall God reveal unto you”;Col. 3:9, 10—“lie not one to another; seeing that ye have put off the old man with his doings, and have put on the new man, that is being renewed unto knowledge after the image of him that created him”;cf.Acts 2:47—“those that were being saved”;1 Cor. 1:18—“unto us who are being saved”;2 Cor. 2:15—“in them that are being saved”;1 Thess. 2:12—“God, who calleth you into his own kingdom and glory.”C. H. Parkhurst:“The yeast does not strike through the whole lump of dough at a flash. We keep finding unsuspected lumps of meal that the yeast has not yet seized upon. We surrender to God in instalments. We may not mean to do it, but we do it. Conversion has got to be brought down to date.”A student asked the President of Oberlin College whether he could not take a shorter course than the one prescribed.“Oh yes,”replied the President,“but then it depends on what you want to make of yourself. When God wants to make an oak, he takes a hundred years, but when he wants to make a squash, he takes six months.”(c) It is distinguished from regeneration as growth from birth, or as the strengthening of a holy disposition from the original impartation of it.Eph. 4:15—“speaking the truth in love, may grow up in all things into him, who is the head, even Christ”;1 Thess. 3:12—“the Lord make you to increase and abound in love one toward another, and toward all men”;2 Pet. 3:18—“But grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ”;cf.1 Pet. 1:23—“begotten again, not of corruptible seed, but of incorruptible, through the word of God, which liveth and abideth”;1 John 3:9—“Whosoever is begotten of God doeth no sin, because his seed abideth in him: and he cannot sin, because he is begotten of God.”Not sin only, but holiness also, is a germ whose nature is to grow. The new love in the believer's heart follows the law of all life, in developing and extending itself under God's husbandry. George Eliot:“The reward of one duty done is the power to do another.”J. W. A. Stewart:“When the 21st of March has come, we say‘The back of the winter is broken.’There will still be alternations of frost, but the progress will be towards heat. The coming of summer is sure,—in germ the summer is already here.”Regeneration is the crisis of a disease; sanctification is the progress of convalescence.Yet growth is not a uniform thing in the tree or in the Christian. In some single months there is more growth than in all the year besides. During the rest of the year, however, there is solidification, without which the green timber would be useless. The period of rapid growth, when woody fibre is actually deposited between the bark and the trunk, occupies but four to six weeks in May, June, and July.2 Pet. 1:5—“adding on your part all diligence, in your faith supply virtue; and in your virtue knowledge”—adding to the central grace all those that are complementary and subordinate, till they attain the harmony of a chorus (ἐπιχορηγήσατε).(d) The operation of God reveals itself in, and is accompanied by, intelligent and voluntary activity of the believer in the discovery and mortification of sinful desires, and in the bringing of the whole being into obedience to Christ and conformity to the standards of his word.John 17:17—“Sanctify them in the truth: thy word is truth”;2 Cor. 10:5—“casting down imaginations, and every high thing that is exalted against the knowledge of God, and bringing every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ”;Phil. 2:12, 13—“work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God who worketh in you both to will and to work, for his good pleasure”;1 Pet. 2:2—“as new-born babes, long for the spiritual milk which is without guile, that ye may grow thereby unto salvation.”John 15:3—“Already ye are clean because of the word which I have spoken unto you.”Regeneration through the word is followed by sanctification through the word.Eph. 5:1—“Be ye therefore imitators of God, as beloved children.”Imitation is at first a painful effort of will, as in learning the piano; afterwards it becomes pleasurable and even unconscious. Children unconsciously imitate the handwriting of their parents. Charles Lamb sees in the mirror, as he is shaving, the apparition of his dead[pg 872]father. So our likeness to God comes out as we advance in years.Col. 3:4—“When Christ who is our life, shall be manifested, then shall ye also with him be manifested in glory.”Horace Bushnell said that, if the stars did not move, they would rot in the sky. The man who rides the bicycle must either go on, or go off. A large part of sanctification consists in the formation of proper habits, such as the habit of Scripture reading, of secret prayer, of church going, of efforts to convert and benefit others. Baxter:“Every man must grow, as trees grow, downward and upward at once. The visible outward growth must be accompanied by an invisible inward growth.”Drummond:“The spiritual man having passed from death to life, the natural man must pass from life to death.”There must be increasing sense of sin:“My sins gave sharpness to the nails, And pointed every thorn.”There must be a bringing of new and yet newer regions of thought, feeling, and action, under the sway of Christ and his truth. There is a grain of truth even in Macaulay's jest about“essentially Christian cookery.”A. J. Gordon, Ministry of the Spirit, 63, 109-111—“The church is Christian no more than as it is the organ of the continuous passion of Christ. We must suffer with sinning and lost humanity, and so‘fill up ... that which is lacking of the afflictions of Christ’(Col. 1:24). Christ's crucifixion must be prolonged side by side with his resurrection. There are three deaths: 1. death in sin, our natural condition; 2. death for sin, our judicial condition; 3. death to sin, our sanctified condition.... As the ascending sap in the tree crowds off the dead leaves which in spite of storm and frost cling to the branches all the winter long, so does the Holy Spirit within us, when allowed full sway, subdue and expel the remnants of our sinful nature.”(e) The agency through which God effects the sanctification of the believer is the indwelling Spirit of Christ.John 14:17, 18—“the Spirit of truth ... he abideth with you, and shall be in you. I will not leave you desolate; I come unto you”;15:3-5—“Already ye are clean.... Abide in me ... apart from me ye can do nothing”;Rom. 8:9, 10—“the Spirit of God dwelleth in you. But if any man hath not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of his. And if Christ is in you, the body is dead because of sin; but the spirit is life because of righteousness”;1 Cor. 1:2, 30—“sanctified in Christ Jesus ... Christ Jesus, who was made unto us ... sanctification”;6:19—“know ye not that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit which is in you, which ye have from God?”Gal. 5:16—“Walk by the Spirit, and ye shall not fulfil the lust of the flesh”;Eph. 5:18—“And be not drunken with wine, wherein is riot, but be filled with the Spirit”;Col. 1:27-29—“the riches of the glory of this mystery among the Gentiles, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory: whom we proclaim, admonishing every man and teaching every man in all wisdom, that we may present every man perfect in Christ; whereunto I labor also, striving according to his working, which worketh in me mightily”;2 Tim. 1:14—“That good thing which was committed unto thee guard through the Holy Spirit which dwelleth in us.”Christianity substitutes for the old sources of excitement the power of the Holy Spirit. Here is a source of comfort, energy, and joy, infinitely superior to any which the sinner knows. God does not leave the soul to fall back upon itself. The higher up we get in the scale of being, the more does the new life need nursing and tending,—compare the sapling and the babe. God gives to the Christian, therefore, an abiding presence and work of the Holy Spirit,—not only regeneration, but sanctification. C. E. Smith, Baptism of Fire:“The soul needs the latter as well as the former rain, the sealing as well as the renewing of the Spirit, the baptism of fire as well as the baptism of water. Sealing gives something additional to the document, an evidence plainer than the writing within, both to one's self and to others.”“Few flowers yield more honey than serves the bee for its daily food.”So we must first live ourselves off from our spiritual diet; only what is over can be given to nourish others. Thomas à Kempis, Imitation of Christ:“Have peace in thine own heart; else thou wilt never be able to communicate peace to others.”Godet:“Man is a vessel destined to receive God, a vessel which must be enlarged in proportion as it is filled, and filled in proportion as it is enlarged.”Matthew Arnold, Morality:“We cannot kindle when we will The fire which in the heart resides; The Spirit bloweth and is still; In mystery our soul abides. But tasks in hours of insight willed Can be in hours of gloom fulfilled. With aching hands and bleeding feet, We dig and heap, lay stone on stone; We bear the burden and the heat Of the long day, and wish 't were done. Not till the hours of light return All we have built do we discern.”(f) The mediate or instrumental cause of sanctification, as of justification, is faith.[pg 873]Acts 15:9—“cleansing their hearts by faith”;Rom. 1:17—“For therein is revealed a righteousness of God from faith unto faith: as it is written, But the righteous shall live from faith.”The righteousness includes sanctification as well as justification; and the subject of the epistle to the Romans is not simply justification by faith, but rather righteousness by faith, or salvation by faith. Justification by faith is the subject ofchapters 1-7; sanctification by faith is the subject ofchapters 8-16. We are not sanctified by efforts of our own, any more than we are justified by efforts of our own.God does not share with us the glory of sanctification, any more than he shares with us the glory of justification. He must do all, or nothing. William Law:“A root set in the finest soil, in the best climate, and blessed with all that sun and air and rain can do for it, is not in so sure a way of its growth to perfection, as every man may be whose spirit aspires after all that which God is ready and infinitely desirous to give him. For the sun meets not the springing bud that stretches toward him with half that certainty as God, the source of all good, communicates himself to the soul that longs to partake of him.”(g) The object of this faith is Christ himself, as the head of a new humanity and the source of truth and life to those united to him.2 Cor. 3:18—“we all, with unveiled face, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are transformed into the same image from glory to glory, even as from the Lord the Spirit”;Eph. 4:13—“till we all attain unto the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a fullgrown man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ.”Faith here is of course much more than intellectual faith,—it is the reception of Christ himself. As Christianity furnishes a new source of life and energy—in the Holy Spirit: so it gives a new object of attention and regard—the Lord Jesus Christ. As we get air out of a vessel by pouring in water, so we can drive sin out only by bringing Christ in. See Chalmers' Sermon on The Expulsive Power of a New Affection. Drummond, Nat. Law in the Spir. World, 123-140—“Man does not grow by making efforts to grow, but by putting himself into the conditions of growth by living in Christ.”1 John 3:3—“every one that hath this hope set on him(ἐπ᾽ αὐτῷ)purifieth himself, even as he is pure.”Sanctification does not begin from within. The objective Savior must come first. The hope based on him must give the motive and the standard of self-purification. Likeness comes from liking. We grow to be like that which we like. Hence we use the phrase“I like,”as a synonym for“I love.”We cannot remove frost from our window by rubbing the pane; we need to kindle a fire. Growth is not the product of effort, but of life.“Taking thought,”or“being anxious”(Mat. 6:27), is not the way to grow. Only take the hindrances out of the way, and we grow without care, as the tree does. The moon makes no effort to shine, nor has it any power of its own to shine. It is only a burnt out cinder in the sky. It shines only as it reflects the light of the sun. So we can shine“as lights in the world”(Phil. 2:15), only as we reflect Christ, who is“the Sun of Righteousness”(Mal. 4:2) and“the Light of the world”(John 8:12).(h) Though the weakest faith perfectly justifies, the degree of sanctification is measured by the strength of the Christian's faith, and the persistence with which he apprehends Christ in the various relations which the Scriptures declare him to sustain to us.Mat. 9:29—“According to your faith be it done unto you”;Luke 17:5—“Lord, increase our faith”;Rom. 12:2—“be not fashioned according to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is the good and acceptable and perfect will of God”;13:14—“But put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh, to fulfil the lusts thereof”;Eph. 4:24—“put on the new man, that after God hath been created in righteousness and holiness of truth”;1 Tim. 4:7—“exercise thyself unto godliness.”Leighton:“None of the children of God are born dumb.”Milton:“Good, the more communicated, the more abundant grows.”Faith can neither be stationary nor complete (Westcott, Bible Com. onJohn 15:8—“so shall ye become my disciples”). Luther:“He whoisa Christian isnoChristian”;“Christianus non in esse, sed in fieri.”In a Bible that belonged to Oliver Cromwell is this inscription:“O. C. 1644. Qui cessat esse melior cessat esse bonus”—“He who ceases to be better ceases to be good.”Story, the sculptor, when asked which of his works he valued most, replied:“My next.”The greatest work of the Holy Spirit is the perfecting of Christian character.Col. 1:10—“Increasing by the knowledge of God”—here the instrumental dative represents the knowledge of God as the dew or rain which nurtures the growth of the plant (Lightfoot).[pg 874]Mr. Gladstone had the habit of reading the Bible every Sunday afternoon to old women on his estate. Tholuck:“I have but one passion, and that is Christ.”This is an echo of Paul's words:“to me to live is Christ”(Phil. 1:21). But Paul is far from thinking that he has already obtained, or is already made perfect. He prays“that I may gain Christ, ... that I may know him”(Phil. 3:8, 10).(i) From the lack of persistence in using the means appointed for Christian growth—such as the word of God, prayer, association with other believers, and personal effort for the conversion of the ungodly—sanctification does not always proceed in regular and unbroken course, and it is never completed in this life.Phil. 3:12—“Not that I have already obtained, or am already made perfect: but I press on, if so be that I may lay hold on that for which also I was laid hold on by Jesus Christ”;1 John 1:8—“If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.”Carlyle, in his Life of John Sterling, chap. 8, says of Coleridge, that“whenever natural obligation or voluntary undertaking made it his duty to do anything, the fact seemed a sufficient reason for hisnotdoing it.”A regular, advancing sanctification is marked, on the other hand, by a growing habit of instant and joyful obedience. The intermittent spring depends upon the reservoir in the mountain cave,—only when the rain fills the latter full, does the spring begin to flow. So to secure unbroken Christian activity, there must be constant reception of the word and Spirit of God.Galen:“If diseases take hold of the body, there is nothing so certain to drive them out as diligent exercise.”Williams, Principles of Medicine:“Want of exercise and sedentary habits not only predispose to, but actually cause, disease.”The little girl who fell out of bed at night was asked how it happened. She replied that she went to sleep too near where she got in. Some Christians lose the joy of their religion by ceasing their Christian activities too soon after conversion. Yet others cultivate their spiritual lives from mere selfishness. Selfishness follows the line of least resistance. It is easier to pray in public and to attend meetings for prayer, than it is to go out into the unsympathetic world and engage in the work of winning souls. This is the fault of monasticism. Those grow most who forget themselves in their work for others. The discipline of life is ordained in God's providence to correct tendencies to indolence. Even this discipline is often received in a rebellious spirit. The result is delay in the process of sanctification. Bengel:“Deus habet horas et moras”—“God has his hours and his delays.”German proverb:“Gut Ding will Weile haben”—“A good thing requires time.”(j) Sanctification, both of the soul and of the body of the believer, is completed in the life to come,—that of the former at death, that of the latter at the resurrection.Phil. 3:21—“who shall fashion anew the body of our humiliation, that it may be conformed to the body of his glory, according to the working whereby he is able even to subject all things unto himself”;Col. 3:4—“When Christ, who is our life, shall be manifested, then shall we also with him be manifested in glory”;Heb. 12:14, 23—“Follow after peace with all men, and the sanctification without which no man shall see the Lord ... spirits of just men made perfect”;1 John 3:2—“Beloved, now are we children of God, and it is not yet made manifest what we shall be. We know that, if he shall be manifested, we shall be like him; for we shall see him even as he is”;Jude 24—“able to guard you from stumbling, and to set you before the presence of his glory without blemish in exceeding joy”;Rev. 14:5—“And in their mouth was found no lie: they are without blemish.”A. J. Gordon, Ministry of the Spirit, 121, puts the completion of our sanctification, not at death, but at the appearing of the Lord“a second time, apart from sin, ... unto salvation”(Heb. 9:28; 1 Thess. 3:13; 5:23). When we shall see him as he is, instantaneous photographing of his image in our souls will take the place of the present slow progress from glory to glory (2 Cor. 3:18; 1 John 3:2). If by sanctification we mean, not a sloughing off of remaining depravity, but an ever increasing purity and perfection, then we may hold that the process of sanctification goes on forever. Our relation to Christ must always be that of the imperfect to the perfect, of the finite to the infinite; and for finite spirits, progress must always be possible. Clarke, Christian Theology, 373—“Not even at death can sanctification end.... The goal lies far beyond deliverance from sin.... There is no such thing as bringing the divine life to such completion that no further progress is possible to it.... Indeed, free and unhampered progress can scarcely begin until[pg 875]sin is left behind.”“O snows so pure, O peaks so high! I shall not reach you till I die!”As Jesus' resurrection was prepared by holiness of life, so the Christian's resurrection is prepared by sanctification. When our souls are freed from the last remains of sin, then it will not be possible for us to be holden by death (cf.Acts 2:24). See Gordon, The Twofold Life, or Christ's Work for us and in us; Brit. and For. Evang. Rev., April, 1884:205-229; Van Oosterzee, Christian Dogmatics, 657-662.

1. Definition of Sanctification.Sanctification is that continuous operation of the Holy Spirit, by which the holy disposition imparted in regeneration is maintained and strengthened.Godet:“The work of Jesus in the world is twofold. It is a work accomplishedfor us, destined to effectreconciliationbetween God and man; it is a work accomplishedin us, with the object of effecting oursanctification. By the one, a rightrelationis established between God and us; by the other, thefruitof the reëstablished order is secured. By the former, the condemned sinner is received into the state of grace; by the latter, the pardoned sinner is associated with the life of God.... How many express themselves as if, when forgiveness with the peace which it procures has been once obtained, all is finished and the work of salvation is complete! They seem to have no suspicion that salvation consists in the health of the soul, and that the health of the soul consists in holiness. Forgiveness is not the reëstablishment of health; it is the crisis of convalescence. If God thinks fit to declare the sinner righteous, it is in order that he may by that means restore him to holiness.”O. P. Gifford:“The steamship whose machinery is broken may be brought into port and made fast to the dock. She issafe, but notsound. Repairs may last a long time. Christ designs to make us both safe and sound. Justification gives the first—safety; sanctification gives the second—soundness.”Bradford, Heredity and Christian Problems, 220—“To be conscious that one is forgiven, and yet that at the same time he is so polluted that he cannot beget a child without handing on to that child a nature which will be as bad as if his father had never been forgiven, is not salvation in anyrealsense.”We would say: Is not salvation in anycompletesense. Justification needs sanctification to follow it. Man needs God to continue and preserve his spiritual life, just as much as he needed God to begin it at the first. Creation in the spiritual, as well as in the natural world, needs to be supplemented by preservation; see quotation from Jonathan Edwards, in Allen's biography of him, 371.Regeneration is instantaneous, but sanctification takes time. The“developing”of the photographer's picture may illustrate God's process of sanctifying the regenerate soul. But it is development by new access of truth or light, while the photographer's picture is usually developed in the dark. This development cannot be accomplished in a moment.“We try in our religious lives to practise instantaneous photography. One minute for prayer will give us a vision of God, and we think that is enough. Our pictures are poor because our negatives are weak. We do not give God a long enough sitting to get a good likeness.”Salvation is something past, something present, and something future; a past fact, justification; a present process, sanctification; a future consummation, redemption and glory. David, in Ps. 51:1, 2, prays not only that God will blot out his transgressions (justification), but that God will wash him thoroughly from his iniquity (sanctification). E. G. Robinson:“Sanctification consistsnegatively, in the removal of the penal consequences of sin from the moral nature;positively, in the progressive implanting and growth of a new principle of life.... The Christian church is a succession of copies of the character of Christ. Paul never says:‘be ye imitators of me’(1 Cor. 4:16), except when writing to those who had no copies of the New Testament or of the Gospels.”Clarke, Christian Theology, 366—“Sanctification does not mean perfection reached, but the progress of the divine life toward perfection. Sanctification is the Christianizing of the Christian.”It is not simply deliverance from the penalty of sin, but the development of a divine life that conquers sin. A. A. Hodge, Popular Lectures, 343—“Any man who thinks he is a Christian, and that he has accepted Christ for justification, when he did not at the same time accept him for sanctification, is miserably deluded in that very experience.”This definition implies:(a) That, although in regeneration the governing disposition of the soul is made holy, there still remain tendencies to evil which are unsubdued.John 13:10—“He that is bathed needeth not save to wash his feet, but is clean every whit[i. e., as a whole]”;Rom. 6:12—“Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body, that ye should obey the lusts thereof”—sindwells[pg 870]in a believer, but itreignsin an unbeliever (C. H. M.). Subordinate volitions in the Christian are not always determined in character by the fundamental choice; eddies in the stream sometimes run counter to the general course of the current.This doctrine is the opposite of that expressed in the phrase:“the essential divinity of the human.”Not culture, but crucifixion, is what the Holy Spirit prescribes for the natural man. There are two natures in the Christian, as Paul shows inRomans 7. The one flourishes at the other's expense. The vine dresser has to cut the rank shoots from self, that all our force may be thrown into growing fruit. Deadwood must be cut out; living wood must be cut back (John 15:2). Sanctification is not a matter of course, which will go on whatever we do, or do not do. It requires a direct superintendence and surgery on the one hand, and, on the other hand a practical hatred of evil on our part that coöperates with the husbandry of God.(b) That the existence in the believer of these two opposing principles gives rise to a conflict which lasts through life.Gal. 5:17—“For the flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh; for these are contrary the one to the other; that ye may not do the things that ye would”—not, as the A. V. had it,“so that ye cannot do the things that ye would”; the Spirit who dwells in believers is represented as enabling them successfully to resist those tendencies to evil which naturally exist within them;James 4:5(the marginal and better reading)—“That spirit which he made to dwell in us yearneth for us even unto jealous envy”—i. e., God's love, like all true love, longs to have its objects wholly for its own. The Christian is two men in one; but he is to“put away the old man”and“put on the new man”(Eph. 4:22, 23). Compare Ecclesiasticus 2:1—“My son, if thou dost set out to serve the Lord, prepare thy soul for temptation.”1 Tim. 6:12—“fight the good fight of the faith”—ἀγωνίζου τὸν καλὸν ἀγῶνα τῆς πίστεως = the beautiful, honorable, glorious fight; since it has a noble helper, incentive, and reward. It is the commonest of all struggles, but the issue determines our destiny. An Indian received as a gift some tobacco in which he found a half dollar hidden. He brought it back next day, saying that good Indian had fought all night with bad Indian, one telling him to keep, the other telling him to return.(c) That in this conflict the Holy Spirit enables the Christian, through increasing faith, more fully and consciously to appropriate Christ, and thus progressively to make conquest of the remaining sinfulness of his nature.Rom. 8:13, 14—“for if ye live after the flesh, ye must die; but if by the Spirit ye put to death the deeds of the body, ye shall live. For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, these are sons of God”;1 Cor. 6:11—“but ye were washed, but ye were sanctified, but ye were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, and in the Spirit of our God”;James 1:26—“If any man thinketh himself to be religious, while he bridleth not his tongue but deceiveth his heart, this man's religion is vain”—see Com. of Neander,in loco—“That religion is merely imaginary, seeming, unreal, which allows the continuance of the moral defects originally predominant in the character.”The Christian is“crucified with Christ”(Gal. 2:20); but the crucified man does not die at once. Yet he is as good as dead. Even after the old man is crucified we are still to mortify him, or put him to death (Rom. 8:13; Col. 3:5). We are to cut down the old rosebush and cultivate only the new shoot that is grafted into it. Here is our probation as Christians. So“die Scene wird zum Tribunal”—the play of life becomes God's judgment.Dr. Hastings:“When Bourdaloue was probing the conscience of Louis XIV, applying to him the words of St. Paul and intending to paraphrase them:‘For the good which I would, I do not, but the evil which I would not, that I do,’‘I find two men in me’—the King interrupted the great preacher with the memorable exclamation:‘Ah, these two men, I know them well!’Bourdaloue answered:‘It is already something toknowthem, Sire; but it is not enough,—one of the two must perish.’”And, in the genuine believer, the old does little by little die, and the new takes its place, as“David waxed stronger and stronger, but the house of Saul waxed weaker and weaker”(2 Sam. 3:1). As the Welsh minister found himself after awhile thinking and dreaming in English, so the language of Canaan becomes to the Christian his native and only speech.

Sanctification is that continuous operation of the Holy Spirit, by which the holy disposition imparted in regeneration is maintained and strengthened.

Godet:“The work of Jesus in the world is twofold. It is a work accomplishedfor us, destined to effectreconciliationbetween God and man; it is a work accomplishedin us, with the object of effecting oursanctification. By the one, a rightrelationis established between God and us; by the other, thefruitof the reëstablished order is secured. By the former, the condemned sinner is received into the state of grace; by the latter, the pardoned sinner is associated with the life of God.... How many express themselves as if, when forgiveness with the peace which it procures has been once obtained, all is finished and the work of salvation is complete! They seem to have no suspicion that salvation consists in the health of the soul, and that the health of the soul consists in holiness. Forgiveness is not the reëstablishment of health; it is the crisis of convalescence. If God thinks fit to declare the sinner righteous, it is in order that he may by that means restore him to holiness.”O. P. Gifford:“The steamship whose machinery is broken may be brought into port and made fast to the dock. She issafe, but notsound. Repairs may last a long time. Christ designs to make us both safe and sound. Justification gives the first—safety; sanctification gives the second—soundness.”Bradford, Heredity and Christian Problems, 220—“To be conscious that one is forgiven, and yet that at the same time he is so polluted that he cannot beget a child without handing on to that child a nature which will be as bad as if his father had never been forgiven, is not salvation in anyrealsense.”We would say: Is not salvation in anycompletesense. Justification needs sanctification to follow it. Man needs God to continue and preserve his spiritual life, just as much as he needed God to begin it at the first. Creation in the spiritual, as well as in the natural world, needs to be supplemented by preservation; see quotation from Jonathan Edwards, in Allen's biography of him, 371.Regeneration is instantaneous, but sanctification takes time. The“developing”of the photographer's picture may illustrate God's process of sanctifying the regenerate soul. But it is development by new access of truth or light, while the photographer's picture is usually developed in the dark. This development cannot be accomplished in a moment.“We try in our religious lives to practise instantaneous photography. One minute for prayer will give us a vision of God, and we think that is enough. Our pictures are poor because our negatives are weak. We do not give God a long enough sitting to get a good likeness.”Salvation is something past, something present, and something future; a past fact, justification; a present process, sanctification; a future consummation, redemption and glory. David, in Ps. 51:1, 2, prays not only that God will blot out his transgressions (justification), but that God will wash him thoroughly from his iniquity (sanctification). E. G. Robinson:“Sanctification consistsnegatively, in the removal of the penal consequences of sin from the moral nature;positively, in the progressive implanting and growth of a new principle of life.... The Christian church is a succession of copies of the character of Christ. Paul never says:‘be ye imitators of me’(1 Cor. 4:16), except when writing to those who had no copies of the New Testament or of the Gospels.”Clarke, Christian Theology, 366—“Sanctification does not mean perfection reached, but the progress of the divine life toward perfection. Sanctification is the Christianizing of the Christian.”It is not simply deliverance from the penalty of sin, but the development of a divine life that conquers sin. A. A. Hodge, Popular Lectures, 343—“Any man who thinks he is a Christian, and that he has accepted Christ for justification, when he did not at the same time accept him for sanctification, is miserably deluded in that very experience.”

Godet:“The work of Jesus in the world is twofold. It is a work accomplishedfor us, destined to effectreconciliationbetween God and man; it is a work accomplishedin us, with the object of effecting oursanctification. By the one, a rightrelationis established between God and us; by the other, thefruitof the reëstablished order is secured. By the former, the condemned sinner is received into the state of grace; by the latter, the pardoned sinner is associated with the life of God.... How many express themselves as if, when forgiveness with the peace which it procures has been once obtained, all is finished and the work of salvation is complete! They seem to have no suspicion that salvation consists in the health of the soul, and that the health of the soul consists in holiness. Forgiveness is not the reëstablishment of health; it is the crisis of convalescence. If God thinks fit to declare the sinner righteous, it is in order that he may by that means restore him to holiness.”O. P. Gifford:“The steamship whose machinery is broken may be brought into port and made fast to the dock. She issafe, but notsound. Repairs may last a long time. Christ designs to make us both safe and sound. Justification gives the first—safety; sanctification gives the second—soundness.”

Bradford, Heredity and Christian Problems, 220—“To be conscious that one is forgiven, and yet that at the same time he is so polluted that he cannot beget a child without handing on to that child a nature which will be as bad as if his father had never been forgiven, is not salvation in anyrealsense.”We would say: Is not salvation in anycompletesense. Justification needs sanctification to follow it. Man needs God to continue and preserve his spiritual life, just as much as he needed God to begin it at the first. Creation in the spiritual, as well as in the natural world, needs to be supplemented by preservation; see quotation from Jonathan Edwards, in Allen's biography of him, 371.

Regeneration is instantaneous, but sanctification takes time. The“developing”of the photographer's picture may illustrate God's process of sanctifying the regenerate soul. But it is development by new access of truth or light, while the photographer's picture is usually developed in the dark. This development cannot be accomplished in a moment.“We try in our religious lives to practise instantaneous photography. One minute for prayer will give us a vision of God, and we think that is enough. Our pictures are poor because our negatives are weak. We do not give God a long enough sitting to get a good likeness.”

Salvation is something past, something present, and something future; a past fact, justification; a present process, sanctification; a future consummation, redemption and glory. David, in Ps. 51:1, 2, prays not only that God will blot out his transgressions (justification), but that God will wash him thoroughly from his iniquity (sanctification). E. G. Robinson:“Sanctification consistsnegatively, in the removal of the penal consequences of sin from the moral nature;positively, in the progressive implanting and growth of a new principle of life.... The Christian church is a succession of copies of the character of Christ. Paul never says:‘be ye imitators of me’(1 Cor. 4:16), except when writing to those who had no copies of the New Testament or of the Gospels.”

Clarke, Christian Theology, 366—“Sanctification does not mean perfection reached, but the progress of the divine life toward perfection. Sanctification is the Christianizing of the Christian.”It is not simply deliverance from the penalty of sin, but the development of a divine life that conquers sin. A. A. Hodge, Popular Lectures, 343—“Any man who thinks he is a Christian, and that he has accepted Christ for justification, when he did not at the same time accept him for sanctification, is miserably deluded in that very experience.”

This definition implies:

(a) That, although in regeneration the governing disposition of the soul is made holy, there still remain tendencies to evil which are unsubdued.

John 13:10—“He that is bathed needeth not save to wash his feet, but is clean every whit[i. e., as a whole]”;Rom. 6:12—“Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body, that ye should obey the lusts thereof”—sindwells[pg 870]in a believer, but itreignsin an unbeliever (C. H. M.). Subordinate volitions in the Christian are not always determined in character by the fundamental choice; eddies in the stream sometimes run counter to the general course of the current.This doctrine is the opposite of that expressed in the phrase:“the essential divinity of the human.”Not culture, but crucifixion, is what the Holy Spirit prescribes for the natural man. There are two natures in the Christian, as Paul shows inRomans 7. The one flourishes at the other's expense. The vine dresser has to cut the rank shoots from self, that all our force may be thrown into growing fruit. Deadwood must be cut out; living wood must be cut back (John 15:2). Sanctification is not a matter of course, which will go on whatever we do, or do not do. It requires a direct superintendence and surgery on the one hand, and, on the other hand a practical hatred of evil on our part that coöperates with the husbandry of God.

John 13:10—“He that is bathed needeth not save to wash his feet, but is clean every whit[i. e., as a whole]”;Rom. 6:12—“Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body, that ye should obey the lusts thereof”—sindwells[pg 870]in a believer, but itreignsin an unbeliever (C. H. M.). Subordinate volitions in the Christian are not always determined in character by the fundamental choice; eddies in the stream sometimes run counter to the general course of the current.

This doctrine is the opposite of that expressed in the phrase:“the essential divinity of the human.”Not culture, but crucifixion, is what the Holy Spirit prescribes for the natural man. There are two natures in the Christian, as Paul shows inRomans 7. The one flourishes at the other's expense. The vine dresser has to cut the rank shoots from self, that all our force may be thrown into growing fruit. Deadwood must be cut out; living wood must be cut back (John 15:2). Sanctification is not a matter of course, which will go on whatever we do, or do not do. It requires a direct superintendence and surgery on the one hand, and, on the other hand a practical hatred of evil on our part that coöperates with the husbandry of God.

(b) That the existence in the believer of these two opposing principles gives rise to a conflict which lasts through life.

Gal. 5:17—“For the flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh; for these are contrary the one to the other; that ye may not do the things that ye would”—not, as the A. V. had it,“so that ye cannot do the things that ye would”; the Spirit who dwells in believers is represented as enabling them successfully to resist those tendencies to evil which naturally exist within them;James 4:5(the marginal and better reading)—“That spirit which he made to dwell in us yearneth for us even unto jealous envy”—i. e., God's love, like all true love, longs to have its objects wholly for its own. The Christian is two men in one; but he is to“put away the old man”and“put on the new man”(Eph. 4:22, 23). Compare Ecclesiasticus 2:1—“My son, if thou dost set out to serve the Lord, prepare thy soul for temptation.”1 Tim. 6:12—“fight the good fight of the faith”—ἀγωνίζου τὸν καλὸν ἀγῶνα τῆς πίστεως = the beautiful, honorable, glorious fight; since it has a noble helper, incentive, and reward. It is the commonest of all struggles, but the issue determines our destiny. An Indian received as a gift some tobacco in which he found a half dollar hidden. He brought it back next day, saying that good Indian had fought all night with bad Indian, one telling him to keep, the other telling him to return.

Gal. 5:17—“For the flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh; for these are contrary the one to the other; that ye may not do the things that ye would”—not, as the A. V. had it,“so that ye cannot do the things that ye would”; the Spirit who dwells in believers is represented as enabling them successfully to resist those tendencies to evil which naturally exist within them;James 4:5(the marginal and better reading)—“That spirit which he made to dwell in us yearneth for us even unto jealous envy”—i. e., God's love, like all true love, longs to have its objects wholly for its own. The Christian is two men in one; but he is to“put away the old man”and“put on the new man”(Eph. 4:22, 23). Compare Ecclesiasticus 2:1—“My son, if thou dost set out to serve the Lord, prepare thy soul for temptation.”

1 Tim. 6:12—“fight the good fight of the faith”—ἀγωνίζου τὸν καλὸν ἀγῶνα τῆς πίστεως = the beautiful, honorable, glorious fight; since it has a noble helper, incentive, and reward. It is the commonest of all struggles, but the issue determines our destiny. An Indian received as a gift some tobacco in which he found a half dollar hidden. He brought it back next day, saying that good Indian had fought all night with bad Indian, one telling him to keep, the other telling him to return.

(c) That in this conflict the Holy Spirit enables the Christian, through increasing faith, more fully and consciously to appropriate Christ, and thus progressively to make conquest of the remaining sinfulness of his nature.

Rom. 8:13, 14—“for if ye live after the flesh, ye must die; but if by the Spirit ye put to death the deeds of the body, ye shall live. For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, these are sons of God”;1 Cor. 6:11—“but ye were washed, but ye were sanctified, but ye were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, and in the Spirit of our God”;James 1:26—“If any man thinketh himself to be religious, while he bridleth not his tongue but deceiveth his heart, this man's religion is vain”—see Com. of Neander,in loco—“That religion is merely imaginary, seeming, unreal, which allows the continuance of the moral defects originally predominant in the character.”The Christian is“crucified with Christ”(Gal. 2:20); but the crucified man does not die at once. Yet he is as good as dead. Even after the old man is crucified we are still to mortify him, or put him to death (Rom. 8:13; Col. 3:5). We are to cut down the old rosebush and cultivate only the new shoot that is grafted into it. Here is our probation as Christians. So“die Scene wird zum Tribunal”—the play of life becomes God's judgment.Dr. Hastings:“When Bourdaloue was probing the conscience of Louis XIV, applying to him the words of St. Paul and intending to paraphrase them:‘For the good which I would, I do not, but the evil which I would not, that I do,’‘I find two men in me’—the King interrupted the great preacher with the memorable exclamation:‘Ah, these two men, I know them well!’Bourdaloue answered:‘It is already something toknowthem, Sire; but it is not enough,—one of the two must perish.’”And, in the genuine believer, the old does little by little die, and the new takes its place, as“David waxed stronger and stronger, but the house of Saul waxed weaker and weaker”(2 Sam. 3:1). As the Welsh minister found himself after awhile thinking and dreaming in English, so the language of Canaan becomes to the Christian his native and only speech.

Rom. 8:13, 14—“for if ye live after the flesh, ye must die; but if by the Spirit ye put to death the deeds of the body, ye shall live. For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, these are sons of God”;1 Cor. 6:11—“but ye were washed, but ye were sanctified, but ye were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, and in the Spirit of our God”;James 1:26—“If any man thinketh himself to be religious, while he bridleth not his tongue but deceiveth his heart, this man's religion is vain”—see Com. of Neander,in loco—“That religion is merely imaginary, seeming, unreal, which allows the continuance of the moral defects originally predominant in the character.”The Christian is“crucified with Christ”(Gal. 2:20); but the crucified man does not die at once. Yet he is as good as dead. Even after the old man is crucified we are still to mortify him, or put him to death (Rom. 8:13; Col. 3:5). We are to cut down the old rosebush and cultivate only the new shoot that is grafted into it. Here is our probation as Christians. So“die Scene wird zum Tribunal”—the play of life becomes God's judgment.

Dr. Hastings:“When Bourdaloue was probing the conscience of Louis XIV, applying to him the words of St. Paul and intending to paraphrase them:‘For the good which I would, I do not, but the evil which I would not, that I do,’‘I find two men in me’—the King interrupted the great preacher with the memorable exclamation:‘Ah, these two men, I know them well!’Bourdaloue answered:‘It is already something toknowthem, Sire; but it is not enough,—one of the two must perish.’”And, in the genuine believer, the old does little by little die, and the new takes its place, as“David waxed stronger and stronger, but the house of Saul waxed weaker and weaker”(2 Sam. 3:1). As the Welsh minister found himself after awhile thinking and dreaming in English, so the language of Canaan becomes to the Christian his native and only speech.

2. Explanations and Scripture Proof.(a) Sanctification is the work of God.1 Thess. 5:23—“And the God of peace himself sanctify you wholly.”Much of our modern literature ignores man's dependence upon God, and some of it seems distinctly intended to teach[pg 871]the opposite doctrine. Auerbach's“On the Heights,”for example, teaches that man can make his own atonement; and“The Villa on the Rhine,”by the same author, teaches that man can sanctify himself. The proper inscription for many modern French novels is:“Entertainment here for man and beast.”TheTendenznovelleof Germany has its imitators in the sceptical novels of England. And no doctrine in these novels is so common as the doctrine that man needs no Savior but himself.(b) It is a continuous process.Phil. 1:6—“being confident of this very thing, that he who began a good work in you will perfect it until the day of Jesus Christ”;3:15—“Let us therefore, as many as are perfect, be thus minded: and if in anything ye are otherwise minded, this also shall God reveal unto you”;Col. 3:9, 10—“lie not one to another; seeing that ye have put off the old man with his doings, and have put on the new man, that is being renewed unto knowledge after the image of him that created him”;cf.Acts 2:47—“those that were being saved”;1 Cor. 1:18—“unto us who are being saved”;2 Cor. 2:15—“in them that are being saved”;1 Thess. 2:12—“God, who calleth you into his own kingdom and glory.”C. H. Parkhurst:“The yeast does not strike through the whole lump of dough at a flash. We keep finding unsuspected lumps of meal that the yeast has not yet seized upon. We surrender to God in instalments. We may not mean to do it, but we do it. Conversion has got to be brought down to date.”A student asked the President of Oberlin College whether he could not take a shorter course than the one prescribed.“Oh yes,”replied the President,“but then it depends on what you want to make of yourself. When God wants to make an oak, he takes a hundred years, but when he wants to make a squash, he takes six months.”(c) It is distinguished from regeneration as growth from birth, or as the strengthening of a holy disposition from the original impartation of it.Eph. 4:15—“speaking the truth in love, may grow up in all things into him, who is the head, even Christ”;1 Thess. 3:12—“the Lord make you to increase and abound in love one toward another, and toward all men”;2 Pet. 3:18—“But grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ”;cf.1 Pet. 1:23—“begotten again, not of corruptible seed, but of incorruptible, through the word of God, which liveth and abideth”;1 John 3:9—“Whosoever is begotten of God doeth no sin, because his seed abideth in him: and he cannot sin, because he is begotten of God.”Not sin only, but holiness also, is a germ whose nature is to grow. The new love in the believer's heart follows the law of all life, in developing and extending itself under God's husbandry. George Eliot:“The reward of one duty done is the power to do another.”J. W. A. Stewart:“When the 21st of March has come, we say‘The back of the winter is broken.’There will still be alternations of frost, but the progress will be towards heat. The coming of summer is sure,—in germ the summer is already here.”Regeneration is the crisis of a disease; sanctification is the progress of convalescence.Yet growth is not a uniform thing in the tree or in the Christian. In some single months there is more growth than in all the year besides. During the rest of the year, however, there is solidification, without which the green timber would be useless. The period of rapid growth, when woody fibre is actually deposited between the bark and the trunk, occupies but four to six weeks in May, June, and July.2 Pet. 1:5—“adding on your part all diligence, in your faith supply virtue; and in your virtue knowledge”—adding to the central grace all those that are complementary and subordinate, till they attain the harmony of a chorus (ἐπιχορηγήσατε).(d) The operation of God reveals itself in, and is accompanied by, intelligent and voluntary activity of the believer in the discovery and mortification of sinful desires, and in the bringing of the whole being into obedience to Christ and conformity to the standards of his word.John 17:17—“Sanctify them in the truth: thy word is truth”;2 Cor. 10:5—“casting down imaginations, and every high thing that is exalted against the knowledge of God, and bringing every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ”;Phil. 2:12, 13—“work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God who worketh in you both to will and to work, for his good pleasure”;1 Pet. 2:2—“as new-born babes, long for the spiritual milk which is without guile, that ye may grow thereby unto salvation.”John 15:3—“Already ye are clean because of the word which I have spoken unto you.”Regeneration through the word is followed by sanctification through the word.Eph. 5:1—“Be ye therefore imitators of God, as beloved children.”Imitation is at first a painful effort of will, as in learning the piano; afterwards it becomes pleasurable and even unconscious. Children unconsciously imitate the handwriting of their parents. Charles Lamb sees in the mirror, as he is shaving, the apparition of his dead[pg 872]father. So our likeness to God comes out as we advance in years.Col. 3:4—“When Christ who is our life, shall be manifested, then shall ye also with him be manifested in glory.”Horace Bushnell said that, if the stars did not move, they would rot in the sky. The man who rides the bicycle must either go on, or go off. A large part of sanctification consists in the formation of proper habits, such as the habit of Scripture reading, of secret prayer, of church going, of efforts to convert and benefit others. Baxter:“Every man must grow, as trees grow, downward and upward at once. The visible outward growth must be accompanied by an invisible inward growth.”Drummond:“The spiritual man having passed from death to life, the natural man must pass from life to death.”There must be increasing sense of sin:“My sins gave sharpness to the nails, And pointed every thorn.”There must be a bringing of new and yet newer regions of thought, feeling, and action, under the sway of Christ and his truth. There is a grain of truth even in Macaulay's jest about“essentially Christian cookery.”A. J. Gordon, Ministry of the Spirit, 63, 109-111—“The church is Christian no more than as it is the organ of the continuous passion of Christ. We must suffer with sinning and lost humanity, and so‘fill up ... that which is lacking of the afflictions of Christ’(Col. 1:24). Christ's crucifixion must be prolonged side by side with his resurrection. There are three deaths: 1. death in sin, our natural condition; 2. death for sin, our judicial condition; 3. death to sin, our sanctified condition.... As the ascending sap in the tree crowds off the dead leaves which in spite of storm and frost cling to the branches all the winter long, so does the Holy Spirit within us, when allowed full sway, subdue and expel the remnants of our sinful nature.”(e) The agency through which God effects the sanctification of the believer is the indwelling Spirit of Christ.John 14:17, 18—“the Spirit of truth ... he abideth with you, and shall be in you. I will not leave you desolate; I come unto you”;15:3-5—“Already ye are clean.... Abide in me ... apart from me ye can do nothing”;Rom. 8:9, 10—“the Spirit of God dwelleth in you. But if any man hath not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of his. And if Christ is in you, the body is dead because of sin; but the spirit is life because of righteousness”;1 Cor. 1:2, 30—“sanctified in Christ Jesus ... Christ Jesus, who was made unto us ... sanctification”;6:19—“know ye not that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit which is in you, which ye have from God?”Gal. 5:16—“Walk by the Spirit, and ye shall not fulfil the lust of the flesh”;Eph. 5:18—“And be not drunken with wine, wherein is riot, but be filled with the Spirit”;Col. 1:27-29—“the riches of the glory of this mystery among the Gentiles, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory: whom we proclaim, admonishing every man and teaching every man in all wisdom, that we may present every man perfect in Christ; whereunto I labor also, striving according to his working, which worketh in me mightily”;2 Tim. 1:14—“That good thing which was committed unto thee guard through the Holy Spirit which dwelleth in us.”Christianity substitutes for the old sources of excitement the power of the Holy Spirit. Here is a source of comfort, energy, and joy, infinitely superior to any which the sinner knows. God does not leave the soul to fall back upon itself. The higher up we get in the scale of being, the more does the new life need nursing and tending,—compare the sapling and the babe. God gives to the Christian, therefore, an abiding presence and work of the Holy Spirit,—not only regeneration, but sanctification. C. E. Smith, Baptism of Fire:“The soul needs the latter as well as the former rain, the sealing as well as the renewing of the Spirit, the baptism of fire as well as the baptism of water. Sealing gives something additional to the document, an evidence plainer than the writing within, both to one's self and to others.”“Few flowers yield more honey than serves the bee for its daily food.”So we must first live ourselves off from our spiritual diet; only what is over can be given to nourish others. Thomas à Kempis, Imitation of Christ:“Have peace in thine own heart; else thou wilt never be able to communicate peace to others.”Godet:“Man is a vessel destined to receive God, a vessel which must be enlarged in proportion as it is filled, and filled in proportion as it is enlarged.”Matthew Arnold, Morality:“We cannot kindle when we will The fire which in the heart resides; The Spirit bloweth and is still; In mystery our soul abides. But tasks in hours of insight willed Can be in hours of gloom fulfilled. With aching hands and bleeding feet, We dig and heap, lay stone on stone; We bear the burden and the heat Of the long day, and wish 't were done. Not till the hours of light return All we have built do we discern.”(f) The mediate or instrumental cause of sanctification, as of justification, is faith.[pg 873]Acts 15:9—“cleansing their hearts by faith”;Rom. 1:17—“For therein is revealed a righteousness of God from faith unto faith: as it is written, But the righteous shall live from faith.”The righteousness includes sanctification as well as justification; and the subject of the epistle to the Romans is not simply justification by faith, but rather righteousness by faith, or salvation by faith. Justification by faith is the subject ofchapters 1-7; sanctification by faith is the subject ofchapters 8-16. We are not sanctified by efforts of our own, any more than we are justified by efforts of our own.God does not share with us the glory of sanctification, any more than he shares with us the glory of justification. He must do all, or nothing. William Law:“A root set in the finest soil, in the best climate, and blessed with all that sun and air and rain can do for it, is not in so sure a way of its growth to perfection, as every man may be whose spirit aspires after all that which God is ready and infinitely desirous to give him. For the sun meets not the springing bud that stretches toward him with half that certainty as God, the source of all good, communicates himself to the soul that longs to partake of him.”(g) The object of this faith is Christ himself, as the head of a new humanity and the source of truth and life to those united to him.2 Cor. 3:18—“we all, with unveiled face, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are transformed into the same image from glory to glory, even as from the Lord the Spirit”;Eph. 4:13—“till we all attain unto the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a fullgrown man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ.”Faith here is of course much more than intellectual faith,—it is the reception of Christ himself. As Christianity furnishes a new source of life and energy—in the Holy Spirit: so it gives a new object of attention and regard—the Lord Jesus Christ. As we get air out of a vessel by pouring in water, so we can drive sin out only by bringing Christ in. See Chalmers' Sermon on The Expulsive Power of a New Affection. Drummond, Nat. Law in the Spir. World, 123-140—“Man does not grow by making efforts to grow, but by putting himself into the conditions of growth by living in Christ.”1 John 3:3—“every one that hath this hope set on him(ἐπ᾽ αὐτῷ)purifieth himself, even as he is pure.”Sanctification does not begin from within. The objective Savior must come first. The hope based on him must give the motive and the standard of self-purification. Likeness comes from liking. We grow to be like that which we like. Hence we use the phrase“I like,”as a synonym for“I love.”We cannot remove frost from our window by rubbing the pane; we need to kindle a fire. Growth is not the product of effort, but of life.“Taking thought,”or“being anxious”(Mat. 6:27), is not the way to grow. Only take the hindrances out of the way, and we grow without care, as the tree does. The moon makes no effort to shine, nor has it any power of its own to shine. It is only a burnt out cinder in the sky. It shines only as it reflects the light of the sun. So we can shine“as lights in the world”(Phil. 2:15), only as we reflect Christ, who is“the Sun of Righteousness”(Mal. 4:2) and“the Light of the world”(John 8:12).(h) Though the weakest faith perfectly justifies, the degree of sanctification is measured by the strength of the Christian's faith, and the persistence with which he apprehends Christ in the various relations which the Scriptures declare him to sustain to us.Mat. 9:29—“According to your faith be it done unto you”;Luke 17:5—“Lord, increase our faith”;Rom. 12:2—“be not fashioned according to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is the good and acceptable and perfect will of God”;13:14—“But put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh, to fulfil the lusts thereof”;Eph. 4:24—“put on the new man, that after God hath been created in righteousness and holiness of truth”;1 Tim. 4:7—“exercise thyself unto godliness.”Leighton:“None of the children of God are born dumb.”Milton:“Good, the more communicated, the more abundant grows.”Faith can neither be stationary nor complete (Westcott, Bible Com. onJohn 15:8—“so shall ye become my disciples”). Luther:“He whoisa Christian isnoChristian”;“Christianus non in esse, sed in fieri.”In a Bible that belonged to Oliver Cromwell is this inscription:“O. C. 1644. Qui cessat esse melior cessat esse bonus”—“He who ceases to be better ceases to be good.”Story, the sculptor, when asked which of his works he valued most, replied:“My next.”The greatest work of the Holy Spirit is the perfecting of Christian character.Col. 1:10—“Increasing by the knowledge of God”—here the instrumental dative represents the knowledge of God as the dew or rain which nurtures the growth of the plant (Lightfoot).[pg 874]Mr. Gladstone had the habit of reading the Bible every Sunday afternoon to old women on his estate. Tholuck:“I have but one passion, and that is Christ.”This is an echo of Paul's words:“to me to live is Christ”(Phil. 1:21). But Paul is far from thinking that he has already obtained, or is already made perfect. He prays“that I may gain Christ, ... that I may know him”(Phil. 3:8, 10).(i) From the lack of persistence in using the means appointed for Christian growth—such as the word of God, prayer, association with other believers, and personal effort for the conversion of the ungodly—sanctification does not always proceed in regular and unbroken course, and it is never completed in this life.Phil. 3:12—“Not that I have already obtained, or am already made perfect: but I press on, if so be that I may lay hold on that for which also I was laid hold on by Jesus Christ”;1 John 1:8—“If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.”Carlyle, in his Life of John Sterling, chap. 8, says of Coleridge, that“whenever natural obligation or voluntary undertaking made it his duty to do anything, the fact seemed a sufficient reason for hisnotdoing it.”A regular, advancing sanctification is marked, on the other hand, by a growing habit of instant and joyful obedience. The intermittent spring depends upon the reservoir in the mountain cave,—only when the rain fills the latter full, does the spring begin to flow. So to secure unbroken Christian activity, there must be constant reception of the word and Spirit of God.Galen:“If diseases take hold of the body, there is nothing so certain to drive them out as diligent exercise.”Williams, Principles of Medicine:“Want of exercise and sedentary habits not only predispose to, but actually cause, disease.”The little girl who fell out of bed at night was asked how it happened. She replied that she went to sleep too near where she got in. Some Christians lose the joy of their religion by ceasing their Christian activities too soon after conversion. Yet others cultivate their spiritual lives from mere selfishness. Selfishness follows the line of least resistance. It is easier to pray in public and to attend meetings for prayer, than it is to go out into the unsympathetic world and engage in the work of winning souls. This is the fault of monasticism. Those grow most who forget themselves in their work for others. The discipline of life is ordained in God's providence to correct tendencies to indolence. Even this discipline is often received in a rebellious spirit. The result is delay in the process of sanctification. Bengel:“Deus habet horas et moras”—“God has his hours and his delays.”German proverb:“Gut Ding will Weile haben”—“A good thing requires time.”(j) Sanctification, both of the soul and of the body of the believer, is completed in the life to come,—that of the former at death, that of the latter at the resurrection.Phil. 3:21—“who shall fashion anew the body of our humiliation, that it may be conformed to the body of his glory, according to the working whereby he is able even to subject all things unto himself”;Col. 3:4—“When Christ, who is our life, shall be manifested, then shall we also with him be manifested in glory”;Heb. 12:14, 23—“Follow after peace with all men, and the sanctification without which no man shall see the Lord ... spirits of just men made perfect”;1 John 3:2—“Beloved, now are we children of God, and it is not yet made manifest what we shall be. We know that, if he shall be manifested, we shall be like him; for we shall see him even as he is”;Jude 24—“able to guard you from stumbling, and to set you before the presence of his glory without blemish in exceeding joy”;Rev. 14:5—“And in their mouth was found no lie: they are without blemish.”A. J. Gordon, Ministry of the Spirit, 121, puts the completion of our sanctification, not at death, but at the appearing of the Lord“a second time, apart from sin, ... unto salvation”(Heb. 9:28; 1 Thess. 3:13; 5:23). When we shall see him as he is, instantaneous photographing of his image in our souls will take the place of the present slow progress from glory to glory (2 Cor. 3:18; 1 John 3:2). If by sanctification we mean, not a sloughing off of remaining depravity, but an ever increasing purity and perfection, then we may hold that the process of sanctification goes on forever. Our relation to Christ must always be that of the imperfect to the perfect, of the finite to the infinite; and for finite spirits, progress must always be possible. Clarke, Christian Theology, 373—“Not even at death can sanctification end.... The goal lies far beyond deliverance from sin.... There is no such thing as bringing the divine life to such completion that no further progress is possible to it.... Indeed, free and unhampered progress can scarcely begin until[pg 875]sin is left behind.”“O snows so pure, O peaks so high! I shall not reach you till I die!”As Jesus' resurrection was prepared by holiness of life, so the Christian's resurrection is prepared by sanctification. When our souls are freed from the last remains of sin, then it will not be possible for us to be holden by death (cf.Acts 2:24). See Gordon, The Twofold Life, or Christ's Work for us and in us; Brit. and For. Evang. Rev., April, 1884:205-229; Van Oosterzee, Christian Dogmatics, 657-662.

(a) Sanctification is the work of God.

1 Thess. 5:23—“And the God of peace himself sanctify you wholly.”Much of our modern literature ignores man's dependence upon God, and some of it seems distinctly intended to teach[pg 871]the opposite doctrine. Auerbach's“On the Heights,”for example, teaches that man can make his own atonement; and“The Villa on the Rhine,”by the same author, teaches that man can sanctify himself. The proper inscription for many modern French novels is:“Entertainment here for man and beast.”TheTendenznovelleof Germany has its imitators in the sceptical novels of England. And no doctrine in these novels is so common as the doctrine that man needs no Savior but himself.

1 Thess. 5:23—“And the God of peace himself sanctify you wholly.”Much of our modern literature ignores man's dependence upon God, and some of it seems distinctly intended to teach[pg 871]the opposite doctrine. Auerbach's“On the Heights,”for example, teaches that man can make his own atonement; and“The Villa on the Rhine,”by the same author, teaches that man can sanctify himself. The proper inscription for many modern French novels is:“Entertainment here for man and beast.”TheTendenznovelleof Germany has its imitators in the sceptical novels of England. And no doctrine in these novels is so common as the doctrine that man needs no Savior but himself.

(b) It is a continuous process.

Phil. 1:6—“being confident of this very thing, that he who began a good work in you will perfect it until the day of Jesus Christ”;3:15—“Let us therefore, as many as are perfect, be thus minded: and if in anything ye are otherwise minded, this also shall God reveal unto you”;Col. 3:9, 10—“lie not one to another; seeing that ye have put off the old man with his doings, and have put on the new man, that is being renewed unto knowledge after the image of him that created him”;cf.Acts 2:47—“those that were being saved”;1 Cor. 1:18—“unto us who are being saved”;2 Cor. 2:15—“in them that are being saved”;1 Thess. 2:12—“God, who calleth you into his own kingdom and glory.”C. H. Parkhurst:“The yeast does not strike through the whole lump of dough at a flash. We keep finding unsuspected lumps of meal that the yeast has not yet seized upon. We surrender to God in instalments. We may not mean to do it, but we do it. Conversion has got to be brought down to date.”A student asked the President of Oberlin College whether he could not take a shorter course than the one prescribed.“Oh yes,”replied the President,“but then it depends on what you want to make of yourself. When God wants to make an oak, he takes a hundred years, but when he wants to make a squash, he takes six months.”

Phil. 1:6—“being confident of this very thing, that he who began a good work in you will perfect it until the day of Jesus Christ”;3:15—“Let us therefore, as many as are perfect, be thus minded: and if in anything ye are otherwise minded, this also shall God reveal unto you”;Col. 3:9, 10—“lie not one to another; seeing that ye have put off the old man with his doings, and have put on the new man, that is being renewed unto knowledge after the image of him that created him”;cf.Acts 2:47—“those that were being saved”;1 Cor. 1:18—“unto us who are being saved”;2 Cor. 2:15—“in them that are being saved”;1 Thess. 2:12—“God, who calleth you into his own kingdom and glory.”

C. H. Parkhurst:“The yeast does not strike through the whole lump of dough at a flash. We keep finding unsuspected lumps of meal that the yeast has not yet seized upon. We surrender to God in instalments. We may not mean to do it, but we do it. Conversion has got to be brought down to date.”A student asked the President of Oberlin College whether he could not take a shorter course than the one prescribed.“Oh yes,”replied the President,“but then it depends on what you want to make of yourself. When God wants to make an oak, he takes a hundred years, but when he wants to make a squash, he takes six months.”

(c) It is distinguished from regeneration as growth from birth, or as the strengthening of a holy disposition from the original impartation of it.

Eph. 4:15—“speaking the truth in love, may grow up in all things into him, who is the head, even Christ”;1 Thess. 3:12—“the Lord make you to increase and abound in love one toward another, and toward all men”;2 Pet. 3:18—“But grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ”;cf.1 Pet. 1:23—“begotten again, not of corruptible seed, but of incorruptible, through the word of God, which liveth and abideth”;1 John 3:9—“Whosoever is begotten of God doeth no sin, because his seed abideth in him: and he cannot sin, because he is begotten of God.”Not sin only, but holiness also, is a germ whose nature is to grow. The new love in the believer's heart follows the law of all life, in developing and extending itself under God's husbandry. George Eliot:“The reward of one duty done is the power to do another.”J. W. A. Stewart:“When the 21st of March has come, we say‘The back of the winter is broken.’There will still be alternations of frost, but the progress will be towards heat. The coming of summer is sure,—in germ the summer is already here.”Regeneration is the crisis of a disease; sanctification is the progress of convalescence.Yet growth is not a uniform thing in the tree or in the Christian. In some single months there is more growth than in all the year besides. During the rest of the year, however, there is solidification, without which the green timber would be useless. The period of rapid growth, when woody fibre is actually deposited between the bark and the trunk, occupies but four to six weeks in May, June, and July.2 Pet. 1:5—“adding on your part all diligence, in your faith supply virtue; and in your virtue knowledge”—adding to the central grace all those that are complementary and subordinate, till they attain the harmony of a chorus (ἐπιχορηγήσατε).

Eph. 4:15—“speaking the truth in love, may grow up in all things into him, who is the head, even Christ”;1 Thess. 3:12—“the Lord make you to increase and abound in love one toward another, and toward all men”;2 Pet. 3:18—“But grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ”;cf.1 Pet. 1:23—“begotten again, not of corruptible seed, but of incorruptible, through the word of God, which liveth and abideth”;1 John 3:9—“Whosoever is begotten of God doeth no sin, because his seed abideth in him: and he cannot sin, because he is begotten of God.”Not sin only, but holiness also, is a germ whose nature is to grow. The new love in the believer's heart follows the law of all life, in developing and extending itself under God's husbandry. George Eliot:“The reward of one duty done is the power to do another.”J. W. A. Stewart:“When the 21st of March has come, we say‘The back of the winter is broken.’There will still be alternations of frost, but the progress will be towards heat. The coming of summer is sure,—in germ the summer is already here.”Regeneration is the crisis of a disease; sanctification is the progress of convalescence.

Yet growth is not a uniform thing in the tree or in the Christian. In some single months there is more growth than in all the year besides. During the rest of the year, however, there is solidification, without which the green timber would be useless. The period of rapid growth, when woody fibre is actually deposited between the bark and the trunk, occupies but four to six weeks in May, June, and July.2 Pet. 1:5—“adding on your part all diligence, in your faith supply virtue; and in your virtue knowledge”—adding to the central grace all those that are complementary and subordinate, till they attain the harmony of a chorus (ἐπιχορηγήσατε).

(d) The operation of God reveals itself in, and is accompanied by, intelligent and voluntary activity of the believer in the discovery and mortification of sinful desires, and in the bringing of the whole being into obedience to Christ and conformity to the standards of his word.

John 17:17—“Sanctify them in the truth: thy word is truth”;2 Cor. 10:5—“casting down imaginations, and every high thing that is exalted against the knowledge of God, and bringing every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ”;Phil. 2:12, 13—“work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God who worketh in you both to will and to work, for his good pleasure”;1 Pet. 2:2—“as new-born babes, long for the spiritual milk which is without guile, that ye may grow thereby unto salvation.”John 15:3—“Already ye are clean because of the word which I have spoken unto you.”Regeneration through the word is followed by sanctification through the word.Eph. 5:1—“Be ye therefore imitators of God, as beloved children.”Imitation is at first a painful effort of will, as in learning the piano; afterwards it becomes pleasurable and even unconscious. Children unconsciously imitate the handwriting of their parents. Charles Lamb sees in the mirror, as he is shaving, the apparition of his dead[pg 872]father. So our likeness to God comes out as we advance in years.Col. 3:4—“When Christ who is our life, shall be manifested, then shall ye also with him be manifested in glory.”Horace Bushnell said that, if the stars did not move, they would rot in the sky. The man who rides the bicycle must either go on, or go off. A large part of sanctification consists in the formation of proper habits, such as the habit of Scripture reading, of secret prayer, of church going, of efforts to convert and benefit others. Baxter:“Every man must grow, as trees grow, downward and upward at once. The visible outward growth must be accompanied by an invisible inward growth.”Drummond:“The spiritual man having passed from death to life, the natural man must pass from life to death.”There must be increasing sense of sin:“My sins gave sharpness to the nails, And pointed every thorn.”There must be a bringing of new and yet newer regions of thought, feeling, and action, under the sway of Christ and his truth. There is a grain of truth even in Macaulay's jest about“essentially Christian cookery.”A. J. Gordon, Ministry of the Spirit, 63, 109-111—“The church is Christian no more than as it is the organ of the continuous passion of Christ. We must suffer with sinning and lost humanity, and so‘fill up ... that which is lacking of the afflictions of Christ’(Col. 1:24). Christ's crucifixion must be prolonged side by side with his resurrection. There are three deaths: 1. death in sin, our natural condition; 2. death for sin, our judicial condition; 3. death to sin, our sanctified condition.... As the ascending sap in the tree crowds off the dead leaves which in spite of storm and frost cling to the branches all the winter long, so does the Holy Spirit within us, when allowed full sway, subdue and expel the remnants of our sinful nature.”

John 17:17—“Sanctify them in the truth: thy word is truth”;2 Cor. 10:5—“casting down imaginations, and every high thing that is exalted against the knowledge of God, and bringing every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ”;Phil. 2:12, 13—“work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God who worketh in you both to will and to work, for his good pleasure”;1 Pet. 2:2—“as new-born babes, long for the spiritual milk which is without guile, that ye may grow thereby unto salvation.”John 15:3—“Already ye are clean because of the word which I have spoken unto you.”Regeneration through the word is followed by sanctification through the word.Eph. 5:1—“Be ye therefore imitators of God, as beloved children.”Imitation is at first a painful effort of will, as in learning the piano; afterwards it becomes pleasurable and even unconscious. Children unconsciously imitate the handwriting of their parents. Charles Lamb sees in the mirror, as he is shaving, the apparition of his dead[pg 872]father. So our likeness to God comes out as we advance in years.Col. 3:4—“When Christ who is our life, shall be manifested, then shall ye also with him be manifested in glory.”

Horace Bushnell said that, if the stars did not move, they would rot in the sky. The man who rides the bicycle must either go on, or go off. A large part of sanctification consists in the formation of proper habits, such as the habit of Scripture reading, of secret prayer, of church going, of efforts to convert and benefit others. Baxter:“Every man must grow, as trees grow, downward and upward at once. The visible outward growth must be accompanied by an invisible inward growth.”Drummond:“The spiritual man having passed from death to life, the natural man must pass from life to death.”There must be increasing sense of sin:“My sins gave sharpness to the nails, And pointed every thorn.”There must be a bringing of new and yet newer regions of thought, feeling, and action, under the sway of Christ and his truth. There is a grain of truth even in Macaulay's jest about“essentially Christian cookery.”

A. J. Gordon, Ministry of the Spirit, 63, 109-111—“The church is Christian no more than as it is the organ of the continuous passion of Christ. We must suffer with sinning and lost humanity, and so‘fill up ... that which is lacking of the afflictions of Christ’(Col. 1:24). Christ's crucifixion must be prolonged side by side with his resurrection. There are three deaths: 1. death in sin, our natural condition; 2. death for sin, our judicial condition; 3. death to sin, our sanctified condition.... As the ascending sap in the tree crowds off the dead leaves which in spite of storm and frost cling to the branches all the winter long, so does the Holy Spirit within us, when allowed full sway, subdue and expel the remnants of our sinful nature.”

(e) The agency through which God effects the sanctification of the believer is the indwelling Spirit of Christ.

John 14:17, 18—“the Spirit of truth ... he abideth with you, and shall be in you. I will not leave you desolate; I come unto you”;15:3-5—“Already ye are clean.... Abide in me ... apart from me ye can do nothing”;Rom. 8:9, 10—“the Spirit of God dwelleth in you. But if any man hath not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of his. And if Christ is in you, the body is dead because of sin; but the spirit is life because of righteousness”;1 Cor. 1:2, 30—“sanctified in Christ Jesus ... Christ Jesus, who was made unto us ... sanctification”;6:19—“know ye not that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit which is in you, which ye have from God?”Gal. 5:16—“Walk by the Spirit, and ye shall not fulfil the lust of the flesh”;Eph. 5:18—“And be not drunken with wine, wherein is riot, but be filled with the Spirit”;Col. 1:27-29—“the riches of the glory of this mystery among the Gentiles, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory: whom we proclaim, admonishing every man and teaching every man in all wisdom, that we may present every man perfect in Christ; whereunto I labor also, striving according to his working, which worketh in me mightily”;2 Tim. 1:14—“That good thing which was committed unto thee guard through the Holy Spirit which dwelleth in us.”Christianity substitutes for the old sources of excitement the power of the Holy Spirit. Here is a source of comfort, energy, and joy, infinitely superior to any which the sinner knows. God does not leave the soul to fall back upon itself. The higher up we get in the scale of being, the more does the new life need nursing and tending,—compare the sapling and the babe. God gives to the Christian, therefore, an abiding presence and work of the Holy Spirit,—not only regeneration, but sanctification. C. E. Smith, Baptism of Fire:“The soul needs the latter as well as the former rain, the sealing as well as the renewing of the Spirit, the baptism of fire as well as the baptism of water. Sealing gives something additional to the document, an evidence plainer than the writing within, both to one's self and to others.”“Few flowers yield more honey than serves the bee for its daily food.”So we must first live ourselves off from our spiritual diet; only what is over can be given to nourish others. Thomas à Kempis, Imitation of Christ:“Have peace in thine own heart; else thou wilt never be able to communicate peace to others.”Godet:“Man is a vessel destined to receive God, a vessel which must be enlarged in proportion as it is filled, and filled in proportion as it is enlarged.”Matthew Arnold, Morality:“We cannot kindle when we will The fire which in the heart resides; The Spirit bloweth and is still; In mystery our soul abides. But tasks in hours of insight willed Can be in hours of gloom fulfilled. With aching hands and bleeding feet, We dig and heap, lay stone on stone; We bear the burden and the heat Of the long day, and wish 't were done. Not till the hours of light return All we have built do we discern.”

John 14:17, 18—“the Spirit of truth ... he abideth with you, and shall be in you. I will not leave you desolate; I come unto you”;15:3-5—“Already ye are clean.... Abide in me ... apart from me ye can do nothing”;Rom. 8:9, 10—“the Spirit of God dwelleth in you. But if any man hath not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of his. And if Christ is in you, the body is dead because of sin; but the spirit is life because of righteousness”;1 Cor. 1:2, 30—“sanctified in Christ Jesus ... Christ Jesus, who was made unto us ... sanctification”;6:19—“know ye not that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit which is in you, which ye have from God?”Gal. 5:16—“Walk by the Spirit, and ye shall not fulfil the lust of the flesh”;Eph. 5:18—“And be not drunken with wine, wherein is riot, but be filled with the Spirit”;Col. 1:27-29—“the riches of the glory of this mystery among the Gentiles, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory: whom we proclaim, admonishing every man and teaching every man in all wisdom, that we may present every man perfect in Christ; whereunto I labor also, striving according to his working, which worketh in me mightily”;2 Tim. 1:14—“That good thing which was committed unto thee guard through the Holy Spirit which dwelleth in us.”

Christianity substitutes for the old sources of excitement the power of the Holy Spirit. Here is a source of comfort, energy, and joy, infinitely superior to any which the sinner knows. God does not leave the soul to fall back upon itself. The higher up we get in the scale of being, the more does the new life need nursing and tending,—compare the sapling and the babe. God gives to the Christian, therefore, an abiding presence and work of the Holy Spirit,—not only regeneration, but sanctification. C. E. Smith, Baptism of Fire:“The soul needs the latter as well as the former rain, the sealing as well as the renewing of the Spirit, the baptism of fire as well as the baptism of water. Sealing gives something additional to the document, an evidence plainer than the writing within, both to one's self and to others.”

“Few flowers yield more honey than serves the bee for its daily food.”So we must first live ourselves off from our spiritual diet; only what is over can be given to nourish others. Thomas à Kempis, Imitation of Christ:“Have peace in thine own heart; else thou wilt never be able to communicate peace to others.”Godet:“Man is a vessel destined to receive God, a vessel which must be enlarged in proportion as it is filled, and filled in proportion as it is enlarged.”Matthew Arnold, Morality:“We cannot kindle when we will The fire which in the heart resides; The Spirit bloweth and is still; In mystery our soul abides. But tasks in hours of insight willed Can be in hours of gloom fulfilled. With aching hands and bleeding feet, We dig and heap, lay stone on stone; We bear the burden and the heat Of the long day, and wish 't were done. Not till the hours of light return All we have built do we discern.”

(f) The mediate or instrumental cause of sanctification, as of justification, is faith.

Acts 15:9—“cleansing their hearts by faith”;Rom. 1:17—“For therein is revealed a righteousness of God from faith unto faith: as it is written, But the righteous shall live from faith.”The righteousness includes sanctification as well as justification; and the subject of the epistle to the Romans is not simply justification by faith, but rather righteousness by faith, or salvation by faith. Justification by faith is the subject ofchapters 1-7; sanctification by faith is the subject ofchapters 8-16. We are not sanctified by efforts of our own, any more than we are justified by efforts of our own.God does not share with us the glory of sanctification, any more than he shares with us the glory of justification. He must do all, or nothing. William Law:“A root set in the finest soil, in the best climate, and blessed with all that sun and air and rain can do for it, is not in so sure a way of its growth to perfection, as every man may be whose spirit aspires after all that which God is ready and infinitely desirous to give him. For the sun meets not the springing bud that stretches toward him with half that certainty as God, the source of all good, communicates himself to the soul that longs to partake of him.”

Acts 15:9—“cleansing their hearts by faith”;Rom. 1:17—“For therein is revealed a righteousness of God from faith unto faith: as it is written, But the righteous shall live from faith.”The righteousness includes sanctification as well as justification; and the subject of the epistle to the Romans is not simply justification by faith, but rather righteousness by faith, or salvation by faith. Justification by faith is the subject ofchapters 1-7; sanctification by faith is the subject ofchapters 8-16. We are not sanctified by efforts of our own, any more than we are justified by efforts of our own.

God does not share with us the glory of sanctification, any more than he shares with us the glory of justification. He must do all, or nothing. William Law:“A root set in the finest soil, in the best climate, and blessed with all that sun and air and rain can do for it, is not in so sure a way of its growth to perfection, as every man may be whose spirit aspires after all that which God is ready and infinitely desirous to give him. For the sun meets not the springing bud that stretches toward him with half that certainty as God, the source of all good, communicates himself to the soul that longs to partake of him.”

(g) The object of this faith is Christ himself, as the head of a new humanity and the source of truth and life to those united to him.

2 Cor. 3:18—“we all, with unveiled face, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are transformed into the same image from glory to glory, even as from the Lord the Spirit”;Eph. 4:13—“till we all attain unto the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a fullgrown man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ.”Faith here is of course much more than intellectual faith,—it is the reception of Christ himself. As Christianity furnishes a new source of life and energy—in the Holy Spirit: so it gives a new object of attention and regard—the Lord Jesus Christ. As we get air out of a vessel by pouring in water, so we can drive sin out only by bringing Christ in. See Chalmers' Sermon on The Expulsive Power of a New Affection. Drummond, Nat. Law in the Spir. World, 123-140—“Man does not grow by making efforts to grow, but by putting himself into the conditions of growth by living in Christ.”1 John 3:3—“every one that hath this hope set on him(ἐπ᾽ αὐτῷ)purifieth himself, even as he is pure.”Sanctification does not begin from within. The objective Savior must come first. The hope based on him must give the motive and the standard of self-purification. Likeness comes from liking. We grow to be like that which we like. Hence we use the phrase“I like,”as a synonym for“I love.”We cannot remove frost from our window by rubbing the pane; we need to kindle a fire. Growth is not the product of effort, but of life.“Taking thought,”or“being anxious”(Mat. 6:27), is not the way to grow. Only take the hindrances out of the way, and we grow without care, as the tree does. The moon makes no effort to shine, nor has it any power of its own to shine. It is only a burnt out cinder in the sky. It shines only as it reflects the light of the sun. So we can shine“as lights in the world”(Phil. 2:15), only as we reflect Christ, who is“the Sun of Righteousness”(Mal. 4:2) and“the Light of the world”(John 8:12).

2 Cor. 3:18—“we all, with unveiled face, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are transformed into the same image from glory to glory, even as from the Lord the Spirit”;Eph. 4:13—“till we all attain unto the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a fullgrown man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ.”Faith here is of course much more than intellectual faith,—it is the reception of Christ himself. As Christianity furnishes a new source of life and energy—in the Holy Spirit: so it gives a new object of attention and regard—the Lord Jesus Christ. As we get air out of a vessel by pouring in water, so we can drive sin out only by bringing Christ in. See Chalmers' Sermon on The Expulsive Power of a New Affection. Drummond, Nat. Law in the Spir. World, 123-140—“Man does not grow by making efforts to grow, but by putting himself into the conditions of growth by living in Christ.”

1 John 3:3—“every one that hath this hope set on him(ἐπ᾽ αὐτῷ)purifieth himself, even as he is pure.”Sanctification does not begin from within. The objective Savior must come first. The hope based on him must give the motive and the standard of self-purification. Likeness comes from liking. We grow to be like that which we like. Hence we use the phrase“I like,”as a synonym for“I love.”We cannot remove frost from our window by rubbing the pane; we need to kindle a fire. Growth is not the product of effort, but of life.“Taking thought,”or“being anxious”(Mat. 6:27), is not the way to grow. Only take the hindrances out of the way, and we grow without care, as the tree does. The moon makes no effort to shine, nor has it any power of its own to shine. It is only a burnt out cinder in the sky. It shines only as it reflects the light of the sun. So we can shine“as lights in the world”(Phil. 2:15), only as we reflect Christ, who is“the Sun of Righteousness”(Mal. 4:2) and“the Light of the world”(John 8:12).

(h) Though the weakest faith perfectly justifies, the degree of sanctification is measured by the strength of the Christian's faith, and the persistence with which he apprehends Christ in the various relations which the Scriptures declare him to sustain to us.

Mat. 9:29—“According to your faith be it done unto you”;Luke 17:5—“Lord, increase our faith”;Rom. 12:2—“be not fashioned according to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is the good and acceptable and perfect will of God”;13:14—“But put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh, to fulfil the lusts thereof”;Eph. 4:24—“put on the new man, that after God hath been created in righteousness and holiness of truth”;1 Tim. 4:7—“exercise thyself unto godliness.”Leighton:“None of the children of God are born dumb.”Milton:“Good, the more communicated, the more abundant grows.”Faith can neither be stationary nor complete (Westcott, Bible Com. onJohn 15:8—“so shall ye become my disciples”). Luther:“He whoisa Christian isnoChristian”;“Christianus non in esse, sed in fieri.”In a Bible that belonged to Oliver Cromwell is this inscription:“O. C. 1644. Qui cessat esse melior cessat esse bonus”—“He who ceases to be better ceases to be good.”Story, the sculptor, when asked which of his works he valued most, replied:“My next.”The greatest work of the Holy Spirit is the perfecting of Christian character.Col. 1:10—“Increasing by the knowledge of God”—here the instrumental dative represents the knowledge of God as the dew or rain which nurtures the growth of the plant (Lightfoot).[pg 874]Mr. Gladstone had the habit of reading the Bible every Sunday afternoon to old women on his estate. Tholuck:“I have but one passion, and that is Christ.”This is an echo of Paul's words:“to me to live is Christ”(Phil. 1:21). But Paul is far from thinking that he has already obtained, or is already made perfect. He prays“that I may gain Christ, ... that I may know him”(Phil. 3:8, 10).

Mat. 9:29—“According to your faith be it done unto you”;Luke 17:5—“Lord, increase our faith”;Rom. 12:2—“be not fashioned according to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is the good and acceptable and perfect will of God”;13:14—“But put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh, to fulfil the lusts thereof”;Eph. 4:24—“put on the new man, that after God hath been created in righteousness and holiness of truth”;1 Tim. 4:7—“exercise thyself unto godliness.”Leighton:“None of the children of God are born dumb.”Milton:“Good, the more communicated, the more abundant grows.”Faith can neither be stationary nor complete (Westcott, Bible Com. onJohn 15:8—“so shall ye become my disciples”). Luther:“He whoisa Christian isnoChristian”;“Christianus non in esse, sed in fieri.”In a Bible that belonged to Oliver Cromwell is this inscription:“O. C. 1644. Qui cessat esse melior cessat esse bonus”—“He who ceases to be better ceases to be good.”Story, the sculptor, when asked which of his works he valued most, replied:“My next.”The greatest work of the Holy Spirit is the perfecting of Christian character.

Col. 1:10—“Increasing by the knowledge of God”—here the instrumental dative represents the knowledge of God as the dew or rain which nurtures the growth of the plant (Lightfoot).[pg 874]Mr. Gladstone had the habit of reading the Bible every Sunday afternoon to old women on his estate. Tholuck:“I have but one passion, and that is Christ.”This is an echo of Paul's words:“to me to live is Christ”(Phil. 1:21). But Paul is far from thinking that he has already obtained, or is already made perfect. He prays“that I may gain Christ, ... that I may know him”(Phil. 3:8, 10).

(i) From the lack of persistence in using the means appointed for Christian growth—such as the word of God, prayer, association with other believers, and personal effort for the conversion of the ungodly—sanctification does not always proceed in regular and unbroken course, and it is never completed in this life.

Phil. 3:12—“Not that I have already obtained, or am already made perfect: but I press on, if so be that I may lay hold on that for which also I was laid hold on by Jesus Christ”;1 John 1:8—“If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.”Carlyle, in his Life of John Sterling, chap. 8, says of Coleridge, that“whenever natural obligation or voluntary undertaking made it his duty to do anything, the fact seemed a sufficient reason for hisnotdoing it.”A regular, advancing sanctification is marked, on the other hand, by a growing habit of instant and joyful obedience. The intermittent spring depends upon the reservoir in the mountain cave,—only when the rain fills the latter full, does the spring begin to flow. So to secure unbroken Christian activity, there must be constant reception of the word and Spirit of God.Galen:“If diseases take hold of the body, there is nothing so certain to drive them out as diligent exercise.”Williams, Principles of Medicine:“Want of exercise and sedentary habits not only predispose to, but actually cause, disease.”The little girl who fell out of bed at night was asked how it happened. She replied that she went to sleep too near where she got in. Some Christians lose the joy of their religion by ceasing their Christian activities too soon after conversion. Yet others cultivate their spiritual lives from mere selfishness. Selfishness follows the line of least resistance. It is easier to pray in public and to attend meetings for prayer, than it is to go out into the unsympathetic world and engage in the work of winning souls. This is the fault of monasticism. Those grow most who forget themselves in their work for others. The discipline of life is ordained in God's providence to correct tendencies to indolence. Even this discipline is often received in a rebellious spirit. The result is delay in the process of sanctification. Bengel:“Deus habet horas et moras”—“God has his hours and his delays.”German proverb:“Gut Ding will Weile haben”—“A good thing requires time.”

Phil. 3:12—“Not that I have already obtained, or am already made perfect: but I press on, if so be that I may lay hold on that for which also I was laid hold on by Jesus Christ”;1 John 1:8—“If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.”Carlyle, in his Life of John Sterling, chap. 8, says of Coleridge, that“whenever natural obligation or voluntary undertaking made it his duty to do anything, the fact seemed a sufficient reason for hisnotdoing it.”A regular, advancing sanctification is marked, on the other hand, by a growing habit of instant and joyful obedience. The intermittent spring depends upon the reservoir in the mountain cave,—only when the rain fills the latter full, does the spring begin to flow. So to secure unbroken Christian activity, there must be constant reception of the word and Spirit of God.

Galen:“If diseases take hold of the body, there is nothing so certain to drive them out as diligent exercise.”Williams, Principles of Medicine:“Want of exercise and sedentary habits not only predispose to, but actually cause, disease.”The little girl who fell out of bed at night was asked how it happened. She replied that she went to sleep too near where she got in. Some Christians lose the joy of their religion by ceasing their Christian activities too soon after conversion. Yet others cultivate their spiritual lives from mere selfishness. Selfishness follows the line of least resistance. It is easier to pray in public and to attend meetings for prayer, than it is to go out into the unsympathetic world and engage in the work of winning souls. This is the fault of monasticism. Those grow most who forget themselves in their work for others. The discipline of life is ordained in God's providence to correct tendencies to indolence. Even this discipline is often received in a rebellious spirit. The result is delay in the process of sanctification. Bengel:“Deus habet horas et moras”—“God has his hours and his delays.”German proverb:“Gut Ding will Weile haben”—“A good thing requires time.”

(j) Sanctification, both of the soul and of the body of the believer, is completed in the life to come,—that of the former at death, that of the latter at the resurrection.

Phil. 3:21—“who shall fashion anew the body of our humiliation, that it may be conformed to the body of his glory, according to the working whereby he is able even to subject all things unto himself”;Col. 3:4—“When Christ, who is our life, shall be manifested, then shall we also with him be manifested in glory”;Heb. 12:14, 23—“Follow after peace with all men, and the sanctification without which no man shall see the Lord ... spirits of just men made perfect”;1 John 3:2—“Beloved, now are we children of God, and it is not yet made manifest what we shall be. We know that, if he shall be manifested, we shall be like him; for we shall see him even as he is”;Jude 24—“able to guard you from stumbling, and to set you before the presence of his glory without blemish in exceeding joy”;Rev. 14:5—“And in their mouth was found no lie: they are without blemish.”A. J. Gordon, Ministry of the Spirit, 121, puts the completion of our sanctification, not at death, but at the appearing of the Lord“a second time, apart from sin, ... unto salvation”(Heb. 9:28; 1 Thess. 3:13; 5:23). When we shall see him as he is, instantaneous photographing of his image in our souls will take the place of the present slow progress from glory to glory (2 Cor. 3:18; 1 John 3:2). If by sanctification we mean, not a sloughing off of remaining depravity, but an ever increasing purity and perfection, then we may hold that the process of sanctification goes on forever. Our relation to Christ must always be that of the imperfect to the perfect, of the finite to the infinite; and for finite spirits, progress must always be possible. Clarke, Christian Theology, 373—“Not even at death can sanctification end.... The goal lies far beyond deliverance from sin.... There is no such thing as bringing the divine life to such completion that no further progress is possible to it.... Indeed, free and unhampered progress can scarcely begin until[pg 875]sin is left behind.”“O snows so pure, O peaks so high! I shall not reach you till I die!”As Jesus' resurrection was prepared by holiness of life, so the Christian's resurrection is prepared by sanctification. When our souls are freed from the last remains of sin, then it will not be possible for us to be holden by death (cf.Acts 2:24). See Gordon, The Twofold Life, or Christ's Work for us and in us; Brit. and For. Evang. Rev., April, 1884:205-229; Van Oosterzee, Christian Dogmatics, 657-662.

Phil. 3:21—“who shall fashion anew the body of our humiliation, that it may be conformed to the body of his glory, according to the working whereby he is able even to subject all things unto himself”;Col. 3:4—“When Christ, who is our life, shall be manifested, then shall we also with him be manifested in glory”;Heb. 12:14, 23—“Follow after peace with all men, and the sanctification without which no man shall see the Lord ... spirits of just men made perfect”;1 John 3:2—“Beloved, now are we children of God, and it is not yet made manifest what we shall be. We know that, if he shall be manifested, we shall be like him; for we shall see him even as he is”;Jude 24—“able to guard you from stumbling, and to set you before the presence of his glory without blemish in exceeding joy”;Rev. 14:5—“And in their mouth was found no lie: they are without blemish.”

A. J. Gordon, Ministry of the Spirit, 121, puts the completion of our sanctification, not at death, but at the appearing of the Lord“a second time, apart from sin, ... unto salvation”(Heb. 9:28; 1 Thess. 3:13; 5:23). When we shall see him as he is, instantaneous photographing of his image in our souls will take the place of the present slow progress from glory to glory (2 Cor. 3:18; 1 John 3:2). If by sanctification we mean, not a sloughing off of remaining depravity, but an ever increasing purity and perfection, then we may hold that the process of sanctification goes on forever. Our relation to Christ must always be that of the imperfect to the perfect, of the finite to the infinite; and for finite spirits, progress must always be possible. Clarke, Christian Theology, 373—“Not even at death can sanctification end.... The goal lies far beyond deliverance from sin.... There is no such thing as bringing the divine life to such completion that no further progress is possible to it.... Indeed, free and unhampered progress can scarcely begin until[pg 875]sin is left behind.”“O snows so pure, O peaks so high! I shall not reach you till I die!”

As Jesus' resurrection was prepared by holiness of life, so the Christian's resurrection is prepared by sanctification. When our souls are freed from the last remains of sin, then it will not be possible for us to be holden by death (cf.Acts 2:24). See Gordon, The Twofold Life, or Christ's Work for us and in us; Brit. and For. Evang. Rev., April, 1884:205-229; Van Oosterzee, Christian Dogmatics, 657-662.

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