“Difficulties there must be in a world in which sin has made deadly confusion. But there comes in the noble, active principle of Christianity:
‘To him that overcometh’; ‘Be of good cheer, I have overcome the world.’
Christianity gives motives, objects, energies, which deliver man when under their influence, from slavery to the scene through which he is passing. He has a right to be a stranger and pilgrim in it. His ear has heard the solemn warning (which elevates, yet sinks, with a sanctifying sorrow as to all around, in the depths of the heart):
‘Arise, ye, and depart; for this is not your rest; because it is polluted.’
And he takes up his cross, and sets out solemnized, broken in spirit perhaps (it is good in such a world), but cheerfully, because he sees that Christ has gone before, and that the victory which overcomes the world is his faith.
For ‘who is he that overcometh the world, but he that believeth that Jesus is the Son of God?’ Christ being his life, in a world of evil and confusion, He can be himself, not conformed or belonging to it; not formed by it in motive or principle of life (though naturally as to mere outward circumstances not uninfluenced by it), but acting in it according to his own; happy to have companions in the excellent of the earth, but a Leader and a Lord in Christ.
By this he judges of everything. He has seen perfection in Christ, and he is led by it. The assimilating power in one only – Christ – God manifested in flesh; folly to the world, of course. But he knows whom he has believed; he has no doubt as to the excellency of the object and the model, nor of its absoluteness and completeness.