It is to this great result, therefore,
and to this great work, that every individual is called. “Be ye holy,”
says God, “for I am holy.” “Be ye perfect, as your Father in heaven is
perfect.” The law of God’s holy nature would not allow him to command
less or to require less. His mighty heart of love is fixed upon the one
great object, that all other hearts, that all other moral beings
throughout the universe may be in unison with himself, and bear his own
image. It is this, still more than mere forgiveness or pardon, great and
wonderful and costly as that is, which constitutes salvation. And if it
is a great work, considered in reference to its results, it is great
also, considered in reference to the difficulties, which perplex it. But
difficult as it is, God, operating by the Holy Spirit in the production
of faith in the heart, can accomplish it. Human nature, instigated by
distrust of God or by confidence in its own efforts, has attempted the
work in other ways, and by other instrumentalities, but always in vain.
It has found all its toils and all its sufferings useless, its fastings,
its pilgrimages, its macerations, its many tears, its fixed purpose of
being better and of doing better, of no avail when unattended by faith.
They are nothing, and perhaps we may say, are worse than nothing, except
when they are yielded as subsequent in time and in cooperation with
faith. Undoubtedly some persons have made the attempt, (ecclesiastical
history, especially that part of it which exists in the shape of
religious biographies and memoirs, furnishes abundant proofs of it,) to
gain the victory over their inward sins, and to sanctify themselves by a
system of works, who have been ignorant, in a great degree, of the true
principles of the Gospel on this subject. They have made the attempt,
therefore, as it is probable, with a considerable degree of natural
sincerity; with a real desire, according to the light which they
possessed, to become what the Lord would have them to be. And God, who
always regards real sincerity of feeling, even when it is perplexed by
ignorance, has in many cases blessed them. But the result invariably has
been, that they see at last, and acknowledge at last, that any system
of human effort, which does not consist in simple cooperation and union
with the antecedent presence and operation of the grace of faith in the
heart, is without avail. So that the first great work of man, the first
indispensable work, indispensable for sanctification as it is for
forgiveness, indispensable now and indispensable moment by moment forever, is to BELIEVE.
—The Life of Faith, Part 2, Chapter 3.
