Augustus Hopkins Strong

“ Complete atonement thou hast made, And to the utmost farthing paid Whate'er thy people owed; How then can wrath on me take place, If sheltered in thy righteousness And sprinkled with thy blood? Turn, then, my soul, unto thy rest; The merits of thy great High-priest Speak peace and liberty; Trust in his efficacious blood, Nor fear thy banishment from God, Since Jesus died for thee!”
Justification, however, is not eternal in the past. We are to repent unto the remission of our sins (Act 2:38) . Remission comes after repentance. Sin is not pardoned before it is committed. ”

“ Now know I well how that fond fantasy, Which made my soul the worshiper and thrall Of earthly art, is vain; how criminal Is that which all men seek unwillingly. Those amorous thoughts that were so lightly dressed—What are they when the double death is nigh? The one I know for sure, the other dread. Painting nor sculpture now can lull to rest My soul that turns to his great Love on high, Whose arms, to clasp us, on the Cross were spread. ”

“ Even the human judge, in passing sentence, commonly endeavors so to set forth the guilt of the criminal that he shall see his doom to be just. So God will awaken the consciences of the lost, and lead them to pass judgment on themselves. Each lost soul can say as Byron's Manfred said to the fiend that tortured his closing hour: “I have not been thy dupe, nor am thy prey, But was my own destroyer.” Thus God's final judgment will be only the culmination of a process of natural selection, by which the unfit are eliminated, and the fit are caused to survive. ”

“ Through blessing and through curse, For better and for worse, We will be one till that dread hour shall come. Life, with its myriad grasp, Our yearning souls shall clasp, By ceaseless love and still expectant wonder, In bonds that shall endure, Indissolubly sure, Till God in death shall part our paths asunder. ”

“ So the world is to be regarded as inflammable material to be set on fire from on high. Our Lord's life on earth is a burning-glass, concentrating rays of light and heat upon the souls of men. When the heating has gone on far enough, and the sparks of incipient conflagration have been sufficiently diffused, suddenly spiritual flame will burst up everywhere and will fill the earth. This is the second advent of him who kindled humanity to new life by his first advent. ”

“ Election and sovereignty are only sources of good. Election is not a decree to destroy,—it is a decree only to save. When we elect a President, we do not need to hold a second election to determine that the remaining millions shall be non-Presidents. It is needless to apply contrivance or force. Sinners, like water, if simply let alone, will run down hill to ruin. The decree of reprobation is simply a decree to do nothing—a decree to leave the sinner to himself. ”

“ Regeneration, or the new birth, is the divine side of that change of heart which, viewed from the human side, we call conversion. It is God's turning the soul to himself,—conversion being the soul's turning itself to God, of which God's turning it is both the accompaniment and cause. It will be observed from the above definition, that there are two aspects of regeneration, in the first of which the soul is passive, in the second of which the soul is active. God changes the governing disposition,—in this change the soul is simply acted upon. ”

“ Baptist doctrine combines the merits of both systems. It has both personality and confession. It is not hierarchical, but experiential. It insists, not upon abstractions, but upon life. Truth without a body is as powerless as a body without truth. A flag without an army is even worse than an army without a flag. Phillips Brooks: “The truth of God working through the personality of man has been the salvation of the world.” Pascal: “Catholicism is a church without a religion; Protestantism is a religion without a church.” Yes, we reply, if church means hierarchy. ”

“ True faith is possible without assurance of salvation. But if Alexander's view were correct, that the object of saving faith is the proposition: “God, for Christ's sake, now looks with reconciling love on me, a sinner,” no one could believe, without being at the same time assured that he was a saved person. Upon the true view, that the object of saving faith is not a proposition, but a person, we can perceive not only the simplicity of faith, but the possibility of faith even where the soul is destitute of assurance or of joy. ”

“ The gospel is damnation to the damnable, and invitation, love and mercy to those who feel their need of it. We are saved through the enforcement of law on every one of us. Forgiveness consists in the removal from consciousness of a sense of ill-desert. Justification, aside from its forensic use, is a transformation and a promotion. Sense of forgiveness is a sense of relief from a hated habit of mind.” This seems to us dangerously near to a denial that justification is an act of God, and to an affirmation that it is simply a subjective change in man's condition. ”

“ When they shall die, then God himself shall die; They live, they live in blest eternity.” God could not let Christ die, and he cannot let us die. Southey: “They sin who tell us love can die. With life all other passions fly; All others are but vanity. In heaven ambition cannot dwell, Nor avarice in the vaults of hell; They perish where they had their birth; But love is indestructible.”
Emerson, Threnody on the death of his beloved and gifted child: “What is excellent, As God lives, is permanent: Hearts are dust, hearts' loves remain; Heart's love will meet thee again.” ”

“ So beliefs crystallize into institutions. But Christian faith is something more vital than the common beliefs of the world. Linking the soul to Christ, it brings Christians into living fellowship with one another before any bonds of outward organization exist; outward organization, indeed, only expresses and symbolizes this inward union of spirit to Christ and to one another. Horatius Bonar: “Thou must be true thyself, If thou the truth wouldst teach; Thy soul must overflow, if thou Another's soul wouldst reach; It needs the overflow of heart To give the lips full speech. ”

“ It is no wonder that believers in the New Testament doctrine and polity felt that they must come out from what they regarded as an apostate church. They could have no sympathy with those who held back the truth in unrighteousness and persecuted the saints of God. But our doctrine has leavened all Christendom. Scholarship is on the side of immersion. Infant baptism is on the decline. The churches that once opposed us now compliment us on our stedfastness in the faith and on our missionary zeal. ”

“ I read in Scripture of a spiritual second coming that precedes the literal, an inward revelation of Christ to his people, a restraining of the powers of darkness, a mighty augmentation of the forces of righteousness, a turning to the Lord of men and nations, such as the world has not yet seen. I believe in a long reign of Christ on earth, in which his saints shall in spirit be caught up with him, and shall sit with him upon his throne, even though this muddy vesture of decay compasses them about, and the time of their complete glorification has not yet come. ”

“ G. F. Wilkin, Control in Evolution: “Belief in immortality is a practical necessity of evolution. If the decisions of to-day are to determine our eternal destiny, then it is vastly more important to choose and act aright, than it is to preserve our earthly life. The martyrs were right. Conscience is vindicated. We can live for the ideal of manhood. Immortality is a powerful reformatory instrument.” Martineau, Study of Religion, 2:388—“If Death gives a final discharge to the sinner and the saint alike, Conscience has told us more lies than it has ever called to their account.” ”

“ The hymn “O sing to me of heaven, when I am called to die” is not true to Christian experience. In that hour the soul sings, not of heaven, but of Jesus and his cross. As houses on river-flats, accessible in time of flood by boats, keep safe only goods in the upper story, so only the treasure laid up above escapes the destroying floods of the last day. Dorner: “The soul will possess true freedom, in that it can no more become unfree; and that through the indestructible love-energy springing from union with God.” ”

“ Bradford, Heredity and Christian Problems, 239—“Christianity puts three motives before men: love, self-love, and fear.” True, but the last two are only preliminary motives, not essentially Christian. The soul that is moved only by self-love or by fear has not yet entered into the Christian life at all. And any attention to the truth of God which originates in these motives has no absolute moral value, and cannot be regarded as even a beginning of salvation. Nothing but holiness and love are entitled to be called Christianity, and these the truth of itself cannot summon up. ”

“ It has been claimed that faith and unbelief are purely intellectual states, which are necessarily determined by the facts at any given time presented to the mind; and that they are, for this reason, as destitute of moral quality and as far from being matters of obligation, as are our instinctive feelings of pleasure and pain. But this view unwarrantably isolates the intellect, and ignores the fact that, in all moral subjects, the state of the affections and will affects the judgment of the mind with regard to truth. In the intellectual act the whole moral nature expresses itself. ”

“ To all moral, and especially to all religious truth, there is an inward unsusceptibility, arising from the perversity of the affections and the will. This blindness and hardness of heart must be removed, before the soul can perceive or be moved by the truth. Hence the Spirit must deal directly with the soul. Denovan: “Our natural hearts are hearts of stone. The word of God is good seed sown on the hard, trodden, macadamized highway, which the horses of passion, the asses of self-will, the wagons of imaginary treasure, have made impenetrable. ”

“ If by sanctification we mean, not a sloughing off of remaining depravity, but an ever increasing purity and perfection, then we may hold that the process of sanctification goes on forever. Our relation to Christ must always be that of the imperfect to the perfect, of the finite to the infinite; and for finite spirits, progress must always be possible. Clarke, Christian Theology, 373—“Not even at death can sanctification end.... The goal lies far beyond deliverance from sin.... There is no such thing as bringing the divine life to such completion that no further progress is possible to it.... ”