The help of the world, the patronage of its rulers, the loan of its resources, the use of its methods they utterly refused, lest by employing these they might compromise their king.  An invading army maintained from an invisible base, and placing more confidence in the leadership of an unseen commander than in all imperial help that might be proffered-that was what so bewildered and angered the heathen, who often desired to make friends with the Christians without abandoning their own gods.

But before we can thus present Christ, there must needs be many heart searchings and humblings before God.  There must be an uncomplaining, uncompromising, embracing of the Cross, and an utter and courageous rejection of the idol "self." Ourselves we cannot save.

Some of my readers--let me warn and encourage you--will pass through agonies and inner tortures which will amount to a thousand deaths in order to unlearn the ways and means of the flesh.  You may little realize how you lean on your committees on "ways and means." You may be organized to death.  Or, you may have gotten into such habits of ostentation, and swagger, and self-advertising, that it will be like uprooting your very life to allow the Cross to be applied.  But, before you can ever lay the Cross on the worldliness in your people, you must first be cut off from all your own "confidence in the flesh."

But let me speak encouragingly as well.  My heart has been pained over the tragic troubles which bother the average minister.  He is "betwixt and between"-of all men most miserable.  As somebody puts it, "We suffer so much, but so seldom with Christ; we have done so much, and so little will remain; we have known Christ in part, and have so effectively barricaded our hearts against His mighty love, which surely He must yearn to give His disciples above all people." All these things have brought upon you untold frets and worries.  Like Saul you are trying to save your kingdom.  But you have actually suffered more miseries than the minister who has embraced the Cross.  You may have saved your life, but you have lost it, even in this world.  The energy of the flesh not only spoils God's work; it spoils your own life and peace.

Your trouble may be that you have been devoted to a cause instead of having the Cross as your sole inspiration, your one and only attraction.  You have been ambitious to build your work.  Shamefully you have made use of Jesus Christ.  But as you contemplate cutting away these fleshly contrivances and false ambitions, you become almost paralyzed with fear.  You will be different!  You will be reckoned a fool and a fanatic!  Oh, the shame you may have to suffer as you humble yourself before your parishioners, your Sunday school, your class! Then think of the contempt you may suffer before your fellow-ministers or fellow-workers.  I believe I know how to sympathize with you.  But cheer up. Once you have been undone in the fires of God's furnace, you will come forth without the smell of your religious self.  Never again will you be content to live in the smoke of formalism and iciness and stiffness of the flesh.  Ah, yes, it will be difficult for God to put His new wine into your old skin.  Be earnest, therefore--dead in earnest--but above all things have a holy discontent to offer any longer "dead things, nothings, shams." Let your fears be gone.  "Better a thousand times effective peculiarity than ineffective ordinariness." (D.  M. Thornton.) Surely our half-hearted and calculating love for the Lord Jesus is the shame of the church, the grief of heaven and the laughingstock of hell.  God cannot stomach the like.  He says, "I will spew thee out of my mouth."

But if you persist in remaining unbroken, stout-hearted, and self-willed, let me give you the advice of Prof.  T. C. Upham, a minister and theologian of a century ago:

They are slow to learn what is to be done, and equally reluctant to submit to its being done.  God desires