Then we come to another of the keywords about which it is very needful that people should have deeper and wider notions than they often seem to cherish.  What is salvation?  Negatively, the removal and sweeping away of all evil, physical and moral, as the schools speak.  Positively, the inclusion of all good for every part of the composite nature of a man which the man can receive and which God can bestow.  And that is the task that the Gospel sets to itself.  Now, I need not remind you how, for the execution of such a purpose, it is plain that something else than man’s power is absolutely essential.  It is only God who can alter my relation to His government.  It is only God who can trammel up the inward consequences of my sins and prevent them from scourging me.  It is only God who can bestow upon my death a new life, which shall grow up into righteousness and beauty, caught of, and kindred to, His own.  But if this be the aim of the Gospel, then its diagnosis of man’s sickness is a very much graver one than that which finds favour amongst so many of us now.  Salvation is a bigger word than any of the little gospels that we hear clamouring round about us are able to utter.  It means something a great deal more than either social or intellectual, or still more, material or political betterment of man’s condition.  The disease lies so deep, and so great are the destruction and loss partly experienced, and still more awfully impending over every soul of us, that something else than tinkering at the outsides, or dealing, as self-culture does, with man’s understanding or, as social gospels do, with man’s economical and civic condition, should be brought to bear.  Dear brethren, especially you Christian ministers, preach a social Christianity by all means, an applied Christianity, for there does lie in the Gospel of Jesus Christ a key to all the problems that afflict our social condition.  But be sure first that there is a Christianity before you talk about applying it.  And remember that the process of salvation begins in the deep heart of the individual and transforms him first and foremost.  The power is ’to every one that believeth.’  It is power in its most universal sweep.  Rome’s Empire was wellnigh ubiquitous, but, blessed be God, the dove of Christ flies farther than the Roman eagle with beak and claw ready for rapine, and wherever there are men here is a Gospel for them.  The limitation is no limitation of its universality.  It is no limitation of the claim of a medicine to be a panacea that it will only do good to the man who swallows it.  And that is the only limitation of which the Gospel is susceptible, for we have all the same deep needs, the same longings; we are fed by the same bread, we are nourished by the same draughts of water, we breathe the same air, we have the same sins, and, thanks be to God, we have the same Saviour.  ’The power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth.’