a reformed heart, and a reformed life are found both by preacher and hearer to be impossible; if all that only brings out the hopelessness of their salvation by reason of the guilt and the pollution and power of sin; then all that will only be to them that same ever deeper entering of the law into their hearts which led Paul to an ever deeper faith and trust in Jesus Christ.  With a guilt, and a pollution, and a slavery to sin like ours, salvation from sin would be absolutely impossible.  Absolutely impossible, that is, but for our Saviour, Jesus Christ.  But with His atoning blood and His Holy Spirit all things are possible—­even our salvation.

Let us choose, then, a minister like Mr. John Menzies.  Let us read the great books that make salvation difficult.  Let us work out our own salvation, day and night, with fear and trembling, and when Wisdom is justified in her children, we shall be found justified among them.  We shall be openly acknowledged and acquitted in the day of judgment, and made perfectly blessed in the full enjoying of God to all eternity.

CHAPTER XV—­MR. PRYWELL

   ’Search me, O God, and know my heart.’—­David.

   ’Let a man examine himself.’—­Paul.

   ’Look to yourselves.’—­John.

   ’Know thyself.’—­Apollo.

The year 1668 saw the publication of one of the deepest books in the whole world, Dr. John Owen’s Remainders of Indwelling Sin in Believers.  The heart-searching depth; the clear, fearless, humbling truth, the intense spirituality, and the massive and masculine strength of John Owen’s book have all combined to make it one of the acknowledged masterpieces of the great Puritan school.  Had John Owen’s style been at all equal to his great learning, to the depth and the grasp of his mind, and to the lofty holiness of his life, John Owen would have stood in the very foremost and selectest rank of apostolical and evangelical theologians.  But in all his books Owen labours under the fatal drawback of a bad style.  A fine style, a style like that of Hooker, or Taylor, or Bunyan, or Howe, or Leighton, or Law, is such a winning introduction to their works and such an abiding charm and spell.  The full title of Dr. Owen’s great work runs thus:  The Nature, Power, Deceit, and Prevalency of the Remainders of Indwelling Sin in Believers—­a title that will tell all true students what awaits them when they have courage and enterprise enough to address themselves to this supreme and all-essential subject.  Fourteen years after the publication of Dr. Owen’s epoch-making book, John Bunyan’s Holy War first saw the light.  Equal in scriptural and in experimental depth, as also in their spiritual loftiness and intensity, those two books are as different as any two books, written in the same language, and written on the same subject, could by any possibility be.  John Owen’s