But he who perishes knows that he has perished, even as he knows the process while he is in the process of perishing.  Therefore, we have to think of the gradual fading away from consciousness, and dying out of a life, of many things beautiful and sweet and gracious, of the gradual increase of distance from Him, union with whom is the condition of true life, of the gradual sinking into the pit of utter ruin, of the gradual increase of that awful death in life and life in death in which living consciousness makes the conscious subject aware that he is lost; lost to God, lost to himself.

Brethren, it is no part of my business to enlarge upon such awful thoughts, but the brighter the light of salvation, the darker the eclipse of ruin which rings it round.  This, then, is the first contrast.

II.  Now note, secondly, the progressiveness of both members of the alternative.

All states of heart or mind tend to increase, by the very fact of continuance.  Life is a process, and every part of a spiritual being is in living motion and continuous action in a given direction.  So the law for the world, and for every man in it, in all regions of his life, quite as much as in the religious, is ’To him that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance.’

Look, then, at this thought of the process by which these two conditions become more and more confirmed, consolidated, and complete.  Salvation is a progressive fact.  In the New Testament we have that great idea looked at from three points of view.  Sometimes it is spoken of as having been accomplished in the past in the case of every believing soul—­’Ye have been saved’ is said more than once.  Sometimes it is spoken of as being accomplished in the present—­’Ye are saved’ is said more than once.  And sometimes it is relegated to the future—­’Now is our salvation nearer than when we believed,’ and the like.  But there are a number of New Testament passages which coincide with this text in regarding salvation as, not the work of any one moment, but as a continuous operation running through life, not a point either in the past, present, or future, but a continued life.  As, for instance, ’The Lord added to the Church daily those that were being saved.’  By one offering He hath perfected for ever them that are being sanctified.  And in a passage in the Second Epistle to the Corinthians, which, in some respects, is an exact parallel to that of my text, we read of the preaching of the Gospel as being a ’savour of Christ in them that are being saved, and in them that are perishing.’

So the process of being saved is going on as long as a Christian man lives in this world; and every one who professes to be Christ’s follower ought, day by day, to be growing more and more saved, more fully filled with that Divine Spirit, more entirely the conqueror of his own lusts and passions and evil, more and more invested with all the gifts of holiness and of blessedness which Jesus Christ is ready to bestow upon him.