3. It is to keep thee watchful and to teach thee war also, the Prince went on. Bishop Butler is about the last author that we would think of going to for light on any deep and intricate question in the evangelical and experimental life. But Butler is so deeply seen into much of the heart of man, as also into many of the ways of God, that even here he has something to say to the point. 'It is vain to object,' he says in his sober and sobering way, 'that all this trouble and danger might have been saved us by our being made at once the creatures and the characters which we were to be. For we experience that what we are to be is to be the effect of what we shall do. And that the conduct of nature is not to save us trouble and danger, but to make us capable of going through trouble and danger, and to put it upon us to do it.' The Apostle Peter has the same teaching in a passage too little attended to, in which he tells us that we are set here to work out our own salvation, and that our salvation will just be what, with fear and trembling, or, as Butler says, with trouble and danger, we work out. No man, let all men understand, is to have his salvation thrust upon him. No man need expect to waken up at the end of an idle, indifferent, inattentive life and find his salvation superinduced upon all that. No man shall wear the crown of everlasting life who has not for himself won it. As every man soweth to the Spirit so also shall he reap. As a soldier warreth, so shall he hear it said to him, Well done. And as a sinner keeps his heart with all diligence, and holds it fast till his King comes, so shall he hear it said to him, Thou hast been faithful over a few things, I will make thee ruler over many things. If thy sins, then, are left in thee to teach thee war, O poor saint of God, then take to thee the whole armour of God; thou knowest the pieces of it, and where the armoury is, and, having done all, stand!
4. And dost thou know, O Mansoul, that it is all to try thy love also? Now, how, just how, do the remainders of sin in the regenerate try their love? Why, surely, in this way. If we really loved sin at the deepest bottom of our hearts, and only loved holiness on the surface, would we not in our deepest hearts close with sin, give ourselves up to it, and make no stand at all against it? Would we not in our deepest and most secret hearts welcome it, and embrace it, look out for it with desire and delight, and part with it with regret? But if, as a matter of fact, we at our deepest and most hidden heart turn from sin, flee from it, fight against it, rejoice when we are rid of it, and have horror at the return of it,--what better proof than that could Christ and His angels have that at bottom we are His and not the devil's? And that grace, at bottom, has our hearts, and not sin; heaven, and not hell? The apostle's protesting cry is our cry also; we also delight in the law of God after our most inward man. For, after our saddest surprises into sin, after its worst outbreaks and overthrows, such all the time were our reluctances, recalcitrations, and resistances, that, swept away as we were, yet all the time, and after it was again over, it was with some good conscience that we said to Christ that He knew all things, and that He knew that we loved Him.
'O benefit of ill! now I find true That better is by evil still made better;
And ruined love, when it is built anew, Grows fairer than at first, more strong, far greater, So I return rebuked to my content, And gain by ill thrice more than I have spent.'
