But let no person think that he can "cover himself with the purple mantle of Christ's sufferings and death," {195} and so win his salvation: "Thou thyself," he says, "must go through Christ's whole journey, and enter wholly into His process."[29] "We become children of God in Christ," he wrote in one of his Epistles, "not by an outward, adventitious show of appropriating Grace, not through some merit of Grace appropriated from without, or received in an historical apprehension of being justified by another, but through an inward, resident Grace, which regenerates us into childlikeness, so that Christ the conqueror of death arises in us and becomes a dominating operation in us."[30] This is the heart of his entire message. Every step must be experimental. Salvation is an inward process, and Christ is efficacious and effective because _He lives and operates in us_. "The suffering and death of Christ," he says, "avail only for those who die to their own will in and with Christ, and are buried with Him to a new will and obedience, and hate sin; who put on Christ in His suffering, reproach, and persecution, take His cross upon them and follow Him under His red banner; to those who put on Christ in His process and now become in the inward spiritual man Christ's members and the Temple of God who dwells in us. No one has a right to comfort himself with Christ's merits unless he desires wholly to put on Christ in himself. He is not a Christian until he has put Him on by true repentance and conversion to Him with absolute resignation and self-denial, so that Christ espouseth and betrotheth Himself with him. . . . For a Christian must be born of Christ and must die to the will of Adam. He must have Christ in him and be a member of His Life according to the spiritual man."[31]