The Prayer Book and the Christian Life; Or, the Conception of the Christian Life Implied in the Book of Common Prayer

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1898 edition. Excerpt: ... CHAPTER VI THE CHRISTIAN LIFE AS SALVATION TF progress in the apprehension of the truth--is so essential, what becomes, it may be asked, of the truth essential to salvation if it needs must be a growing and expanding truth. Christ came to save men, and was there not enough truth to save men in the beginning, and if so what is the use of more? The answer is patent. Salvation is accord with God, and to come into accord with God is not simply to know, but to assimilate and come into harmony with what we know. The instrument of salvation is faith, the faith which is not chiefly intellectual assent but moral surrender, the committing of one's soul and life to the truth of God, the knowledge of which it possesses. Thus to believe Christ as he is revealed to us by coming unto him for rest, and taking his yoke upon us to guide our labor into rest, i. e. by moral and spiritual surrender, this is for every soul salvation. But as we know more and learn more of Him, fuller surrender still is possible and also imperative for that accord with God, which is salvation. So St. Paul evidently felt when he spoke of leaving the things which are behind and pressing forward towards the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus. He had had a knowledge of Christ very real, very consolatory, very stimulating; but he came in the course of his growth into the knowledge of Christ to feel that his previous knowledge had been a knowing of Christ after the flesh, from outside, as it were. But much as that knowledge had done for him, it could not satisfy him longer. Now henceforth know we him no more after the flesh, he exclaimed, but in the fuller truth of experience, and thought, and service, which had revealed him yet more completely; in the...