But it is not possible for God to sin, and yet he can be good. Here we come to the heart of our confusion regarding a Christian’s goodness. God not only can be good, He himself _is goodness_. He is holy in a way that no man ever was or ever can be. For man’s holiness is never absolute in this sense, but always relative. Not relative in the sense that sin must be present, but relative because of the moment by moment relationship with God, the Holy One. Therefore for the Christian to be kept from sinning he must abide in Christ, and he cannot do other than sin if left to himself. At the root of all these eradication theories lies the assumption that man is to be made independently holy. But man is a dependent creature. This is of the essence of humanity, altogether apart from sin. Utter dependence on his creator and his Saviour (and the Saviour is the creator of the new life) is the only safety for the child of God. There is indeed no room for boasting nor for looking to self when we learn God’s wondrous plan of salvation by grace. Two Christian workers were talking together at the lunch table about the question of what happened to a man when he is saved. One of the brethren pointed to the granulated sugar in the bowl as representing him as a lost man. He then took a spoon as representing the divine life imparted in conversion, stuck it into the sugar, and said: “This represents my new nature, and the sugar is still the same corrupt nature. But I am in Christ as the sugar is in the bowl.” In other words Christ is enclosing a mass of corruption with a righteous spark injected into it. Another Christian worker, representing what Christ did in saving him, drew his coat about him so as to cover up his white vest, and said that in just this way God clothes us with Christ’s righteousness, while we remain a mass of corruption beneath. Still another, putting these illustrations into theological terms, said: “God imputes the righteousness of Christ to me in exactly the same way as he imputes my sin to Christ. So that when God looks at me he sees the righteousness of Christ, just as when he looks at Jesus he sees my sin.” The implication is that righteousness touches me in just the way that sin touches Christ, namely, it is as far from me as the east is from the west. These brethren are all true children of God, washed in the precious blood of Christ. Fortunately they were not telling the truth about themselves; more seriously they were maligning the Saviour, and while the intellectual confusion may not keep them from victory in their own lives it serves to entangle many an earnest seeker. And this sort of handling of God’s word is what has furnished the enemies of the Gospel of grace their chief weapons in attack. These statements, if they are taken at their face value, constitute as complete a denial of the God and Father of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ as Mrs. Eddy’s philosophy of the denial of sin and the Saviour.