First, then, it is present in the offer to bestow it, and the exhortations and influences to lay hold on it. When CHRIST rose victorious from the tomb, having paid the ransom for all the prisoners of the law, and purchased the right and power of being their Saviour, He did not immediately make all the men of His time actual partakers of the privileges, nor did He provide that all who should thereafter be born, should from their birth inherit the blessing, as from Adam they had inherited the curse. No man might say, “CHRIST has died and risen again, therefore, I am certainly saved, without any reserve or delay on His part, without any effort, almost without any desire, on my part.” Salvation was then provided; rather, the fountain was then opened, and began to flow; but each man in his turn, at the call of GOD, and in the way of GOD’S appointment, was, so to speak, to help himself to salvation. In other words, what CHRIST did, was not to take all who were then living into an ark, and to cause all that sprung from them to be born and brought up in that ark; but simply to build an ark, and leave it open for all ages, and to offer helps to reach it, and to urge an entrance into it upon all men, by the entreaties and promises of His love, and the threats of His wrath. We want to be impressed with this. We are too apt to look upon salvation as an accomplished fact, belonging to the past; to speak of the blessedness of being born after the atonement has been made; to take for granted that we are actually saved, rather than that we have a present offer of salvation; and even to regard the ordinances of religion, as Baptism and Holy Communion, more as ceremonies of thankful faith, acknowledgments of obligation for past favours, than as means of laying hold on a now offered, and, as yet, unattained blessing.