Mark well, then, our next step. It is not enough to tell us that we must conquer the wrong by doing the right. The question is this: Is there any power, anything in what is called saving grace, which is adequate to the struggle on our part, and which appropriated can make us, to use the Apostle's description, "more than conquerors"?
There is; and I will try, first, to tell you what it is, and, secondly, how we may realize it. It is--call it by what name we may for the moment--that which casts out the mean, the ignoble, and the selfish, by filling out life with the great, the noble, and the unselfish. It is, in a word, the salvation which means the "highest character and blessedness, which we, individually and collectively, are capable of reaching and realizing." Let us, then, call it what it is--the power of God unto salvation. And how are we to get it into our possession? The answer is, it needs no getting in. Potentially it is there. "The kingdom of God is within you," says Jesus, and it is ours to bring it out in all its actual reality. It is the greater which includes the less, of the gracious possessions God has put in our being, and of which we know so little because we do not work these inward mines: "Work out your own salvation, for it is God that worketh in you."
Some one makes a great inventor say: "Anybody might have done it, but the secret came to me." Do you believe the first part of this statement? Would you hold me true in saying that anybody might have anticipated the discovery of wireless telegraphy? There are times when the world appears to halt for want of some new thing, or for want of some one to put new meaning into the old. And when the fulness of time has come, the secret, which has been sleeping through centuries of men, awakes in a man. He is the chosen of Providence to deliver unto us that which he also has received.
What is true of a few in the endowment of what we call genius, may be true of us all in the power of God unto salvation. When we were "made in secret, and curiously wrought in the lowest parts of the earth," the Maker of us all put a part of Himself into the mysterious substance. "Let each man," says Browning, "think himself a thought, an act, a breath of God." There is evil in our nature; but evil can mar us only so far as we allow it to become sin. It is in victory over evil that we find character and make. There is evil in our nature, but there is also a germ of God which He can touch into immortality and glorify with the very splendour of His own image and being. When that germ is quickened into life, we are, in the language of theology, converted; as it develops and becomes the more life and the fuller, we are, in the same language, sanctified and made meet for the Master's use.