When St. Paul comforts the Corinthians with the assurance that the struggle they are enduring is common to man, that God has not given them more to endure than that which is coming upon all their brethren, the Holy Ghost inspires him to guard this point carefully.[12] He assures them {6} that God Who is faithful to His word, "not slack concerning His promise,"[13] "will not suffer you to be tempted above that ye are able." The very fact of the approach of a trial or temptation is in itself the irrefutable proof that we are strong enough to conquer it, if only we use faithfully what we have, and what will be given. He then goes on to say that God "will, with the temptation also make a way to escape"; but the escape is not to be from temptation. He promises indeed to "make a way to escape," but only in order "_that ye may be able to bear it_,"--the escape is to be from the failure, from sin, never from the conflict so long as life endures. "There is no discharge in that war."[14] This is the condition under which life in this world exists; the only escape from it lies in base surrender to the enemy of God and man. If we face this condition, and accept it without flinching, we are then in the position of a soldier who, having weighed well the purpose and significance of his enlistment, is ready with generous spirit to submit to all that it involves. No surprises or disheartening revelations of the nature of the struggle will meet us, because we shall have understood well in the beginning what we are undertaking and what we must expect. {7} III. _The Terms of the Warfare_ Let us in the beginning set clearly before ourselves a few simple facts, facts with which we have been conversant all our lives, but which our lifelong course shows us to have taken too little into account. These we must regard in a very personal way, for our study will be worse than futile if it be not intensely personal. Let each one of us, therefore, set clearly before himself these fundamental propositions: (1) Our Leader is our Lord Jesus Christ, fighting now, as He fought when He was on earth, in the perfect powers of His Sacred Humanity. We must for our own encouragement remember that though He is perfect God as well as perfect Man, yet it was not by means of His divine power alone that He fought His own battle against temptation and conquered. He won the victory by the use of His human will, fortified by His divinity. It was as Man, not as God, that He fought and conquered. Had he contended against Satan in His God-nature only, there would have been no real struggle, for even the slightest exercise of His divine power must have crushed the enemy in a single moment of time. It was just because He did fight as Man, {8} in the power of His finite and created nature, that there could be a real conflict.