Think a moment, brethren: look into your ways and thoughts about religion, and you will, perhaps, find that it is so with you; that, whatever may be your theory, your practice does not assent to the truth, that “Now is the day of salvation”; that you have now to be saved, yet to be washed from sin, to have its power destroyed in you, to be qualified for salvation, to lay hold on it, to work it out with fear and trembling, as that which, though commenced, is not certain to be completed—which, even when got, may again be lost. It may occur to you, as an objection to this statement, that you use means of grace, and somewhat diligently; that you exercise yourselves in prayer, and by Christian discipline; that you depend continually upon the ever-present grace of GOD; that you count not yourselves to have attained; that you seek to go on unto perfection. All this may be true, and yet—I beseech you ask yourselves whether it is not so with you—the latent feeling may be, that salvation is a thing inherited, already, in a measure, attained; and that what religion requires of you, and what you render, is gratitude to the Giver, and a due appreciation of the gift, sought to be testified and developed by a becoming life, and an enlarging of the spiritual faculties, which by and by will have so much more to exercise themselves upon. But, secondly, is not this, it may be urged, a right view and feeling? Is not this what the ministers of religion should labour to impress upon the baptized: that they have received salvation—the grace of GOD, which bringeth salvation? Are we not taught by the Church, and by the Bible, that in baptism we were born again, that we then became children of GOD—and if children, then heirs, joint heirs with CHRIST; that we are, therefore, from that new birth as actually the inheritors of a blessing, as naturally we were inheritors of a curse; and that, thenceforth, it is proper for us to say, “I heartily thank my Heavenly Father that he hath called me to this state of salvation through JESUS CHRIST”? It is even so, brethren. “Now is the day of salvation,” may mean to us Christians, “now we _have_ salvation,” rather than “now it is only offered to us.” It may be intended to stir us up to a consideration of our high calling, to an appreciation of the great gift already bestowed, to a remembrance of what GOD has already done for us, to a sense of His abiding presence. There is no doubt—whether this text teaches it or no is another question—that the disciples of CHRIST have a present possession, as well as a present offer of salvation; and what I meant in the first part, was not to hide this truth, but to guard against the error, to correct whatever amount you might have of the feeling, that we have already a final gift, so complete that nothing can be added to it, so altogether of the past, that we can do nothing in the present, but acknowledge the goodness of GOD in bestowing it, and wait on Him patiently and holily