This view reduces the debt to the debtor’s ability to pay,—a short and easy method of discharging obligations. I can leap over a church steeple, if I am only permitted to make the church steeple low enough; and I can touch the stars, if the stars will only come down to my hand. The Philistines are quite equal to Samson, if they may only cut off Samson’s locks. So I can obey God’s law, if I may only make God’s law what I want it to be. The fundamental error of perfectionism is its low view of God’s law; the second is its narrow conception of sin. John Wesley: “I believe a person filled with love of God is still liable to involuntary transgressions. Such transgressions you may call sins, if you please; I do not.” The third error of perfectionism is its exaggerated estimate of man’s power of contrary choice. To say that, whatever may have been the habits of the past and whatever may be the evil affections of the present, a man is perfectly able at any moment to obey the whole law of God, is to deny that there are such things as character and depravity. Finney, Gospel Themes, 383, indeed, disclaimed “all expectations of attaining this state ourselves, and by our own independent, unaided efforts.” On the Law of God, see pages 537‐544. Augustine: “Every lesser good has an essential element of sin.” Anything less than the perfection that belongs normally to my present stage of development is a coming short of the law’s demand. R. W. Dale, Fellowship with Christ, 359—“For us and in this world, the divine is always the impossible. Give me a law for individual conduct which requires a perfection that is within my reach, and I am sure that the law does not represent the divine thought. ‘_Not that I have already obtained, or am already made perfect: but I press on, if so be that I may lay hold on that for which also I was laid hold on by Christ Jesus_’ (_Phil. 3:12_)—this, from the beginning, has been the confession of saints.” The Perfectionist is apt to say that we must “take Christ twice, once for justification and once for sanctification.” But no one can take Christ for justification without at the same time taking him for sanctification. Dr. A. A. Hodge calls this doctrine “Neonomianism,” because it holds not to one unchanging, ideal, and perfect law of God, but to a second law given to human weakness when the first law has failed to secure obedience.