This self-giving nature of God is everywhere taken for granted--it is just _that_ which he feels that Christ has once for all made sun-clear, and it is because He is essentially self-giving that God pours out His life and love upon us as He does His sunshine upon the grass and flowers. "The Word of God is with thee before thou seekest; He gives before thou hast asked; He opens to thee before thou hast knocked." God like a Father deals with His wayward children. "Oh, blessed is the man," he writes, "who in his need finds the love of God and comes to Him for forgiveness!"[28] No one of us who has been washed from his sins, he beautifully says, ought to eat a piece of bread without considering how God loves him and how he ought to love God, who in Jesus Christ His Son laid aside His right to Divinity that His love might appear complete.[29] "It has pleased the eternal Love," he writes, "that that Person in whom Love was shown in the highest degree should be called the Saviour of His people. Not that it would be possible for human nature to make anybody saved, but God was so completely identified in Love with Him that all the Will of God was the will of this Person, and the sufferings of this Person were and counted as the sufferings of God Himself."[30]
Christ is for him the complete manifestation of life and the perfect exhibition or unveiling of God's love, and he who appreciates this love, feels its attraction, and lives a life which corresponds to his soul's insight, becomes { 26} himself Christlike, forsakes sin and self, and enters upon a life of salvation. "All who are saved," he says, "are of one spirit with God, and he who is the foremost in love is the foremost of those who are saved."[31] "He who gets weary of God has never found Him," while the person who has found Him in this love-way will be ready and willing to give up even his own salvation and accept damnation for the love of God, since he knows in his heart that "God is so wholly good that He can give to such a man only what is highest and best, and that is Himself!"[32] That is to say, he who is willing to be damned for the love of God never will be damned!
But salvation must never be conceived as something which is the result of a transaction. It is from beginning to end a life-process and can in no way be separated from character and personal attitude of will. "He who depends on the merit of Christ," he says, "and yet continues in a fleshly, wicked life, regards Christ precisely as in former times the heathen held their gods. He who really believes that Christ has saved him can no longer be a servant of sin, for no one believes rightly until he leaves his old life."[33] "It is not enough," he elsewhere writes, "that God is in thee; thou must also be in God, that is, partake of the life of God. It does not help to have God if thou dost not honour Him. It is no avail to call thyself His child _if thou dost not behave thyself like a child_!"[34] He insists that no one can be "called righteous" or be "counted righteous" until he actually _is_ righteous. Nothing can be "imputed" to a man which is not ethically and morally present as a living feature of his character and conduct. No one, he truly says, can know _Christ as a means of salvation_ unless he follows Him in his life. He who does not witness to Christ in his daily walk grows into a different person from the one he is called to be.[35] The person who lives on in sin does not really know God, and, { 27} to use his fine figure; is like a man who has lost his home and gone astray, and does not even know that he is _at home_, when his Father has found him and has welcomed him back, but still goes on hunting for home and for Father, since he does not recognize his home or his Father when he has found them![36]