whether absolute sinlessness is possible for a Christian man on earth.
Whatever view we take upon that question, it ought not to hide from us
the fact which should loom very much more largely in our daily
operative belief than it does with most of us, that in so far as the
power which is given to us is concerned, perfect victory is within our
grasp, and is the only worthy and correspondent result to the perfect
power which worketh in us. So there is no reason, as from any defect
of the divine gift to the weakest of us, why our Christian lives
should have ups and downs, why there should be interruptions in our
devotion, fallings short in our consecration, contradictions in our
conduct, slidings backward in our progress. There is no reason why, in
our Christian year, there should be summer and winter; but according
to the symbolical saying of one of the old prophets, 'The ploughman
may overtake the reaper, and he that treadeth out the grapes him that
soweth the seed.' In so far as our Christian life is concerned, the
perfection of the power that is granted to us involves the possibility
of perfection in the recipient.

And the same thing is true in reference to a Christian man's work in
the world. God's Church has ample resources to overcome the evil of
the world. The fire is tremendous, but the Christian Church has
possession of the floods that can extinguish the fire. If we utilised
all that we have, we might 'smite till we had consumed,' and turned
the world into the Church of God. That is the ideal, the possibility,
when we look at the Christian man as possessor of the communicated
power of God. And then we turn to the reality, to our own consciences,
to the state of our religious communities everywhere, and we see what
seems to be blank contradiction of the possibility. Where is the
explanation?