In will power, in mere spasms of earnestness, there is no salvation.
Struggle, effort, even agony, have their place in Christianity, as we
shall see; but this is not where they come in.
In mid-Atlantic the Etruria, in which I was sailing, suddenly stopped.
Something had gone wrong with the engines. There were five hundred
able-bodied men on board the ship. Do you think that if we had
gathered together and pushed against the mast we could have pushed it
on?
When one attempts to sanctify himself by effort, he is trying to make
his boat go by pushing against the mast. He is like a drowning man
trying to lift himself out of the water by pulling at the hair of his
own head.
Christ held up this method almost to ridicule when He said, "Which of
you by taking thought can add a cubit to his stature?" Put down that
method forever as being futile.
The one redeeming feature of the self-sufficient method is this--that
those who try it find out almost at once that it will not gain the
goal.
2. Another experimenter says: "But that is not my method. I have seen
the folly of a mere wild struggle in the dark. I work on a principle.
My plan is not to waste power on random effort, but to concentrate on
a single sin. By taking