October 12

"In your faith supply virtue."—2 Peter 1:5 (R.V.).

I HAVE too little of the Christian grace of virtue—fearlessness and endurance and courage.

I am set for the defence of the truth—the truth as it is in Jesus. But that truth is not much liked by the majority. The Puritan and Pauline gospel, so humbling in its doctrines, so exacting in its demands, offends the tastes of multitudes. I need bravery, if I am to proclaim it with certitude and firmness.

And I am commanded to crucify the flesh. After ten, twenty, thirty years of the regenerated life, there are bad passions which I must abjure—the canker of envy, the fire of anger, the fever of self-will, the poison of vanity. It is not easy to vanquish such principalities and powers. It demands a stout heart.

And I am expected to convert the world. But it looks a quixotic enterprise. The cultured world proud of its attainments, the commercial world absorbed in its money-getting, the pleasure-seeking world, the easy-going and optimistic world, the dark heathen world at home and abroad—it is a bold thing to assail such a foe, and to believe that it will yet be changed into a friend.

There was a moment in the French Revolution when the Republic was ringed round with enemies. The Prussians were on the Rhine, the Piedmontese in the Alps, the English in the Netherlands—La Vendée had rebelled in the west, and Lyons in the east. But Danton cried, "We need audacity, and again audacity, and always audacity." It is what I must have in the Holy War—a sanctified audacity that will dare anything and everything on Christ's behalf.