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The close connection between a sincere recognition of all that is implied in the sin of the world and an appreciation of the reality of grace, has been clearly shown in the history of error. It held together the two denials which characterised the Pelagian heresy of the fifth century. For it has been truly said that "it was only by ignoring the great overthrow that Pelagius could dispense with the great restorative force." He had to say "we have no inborn sin" in order that he might say "we need no inward grace." And at all times there is no more certain way to drain the life out of our religion, and to quench all brightness in the things of faith, than to trifle with the idea of sin — to mitigate the verdict of conscience in regard to it, to try to explain it away, or to make ourselves easy in its presence. We disguise from ourselves the gravity of the disease, and then the remedy seems disproportionate and unnecessary. But when the conscience is unsophisticated and outspoken; when we do justice in our thoughts to the power and tyranny of sin; then we feel that nothing save a real and living energy could cope with such a misery; that grace must be a reality if it is to deal with the sin of the world. And grace is indeed most real. It is an energy at least as true, as traceable in the large course of human history as any influence that we can find there. But before we try to see its work it is necessary that we should know what grace means in Christian thought and teaching. "Grace," writes Dr. Mozley, "is power. That power whereby God works in nature is called power. That power whereby He works in the wills of His reasonable creatures is called grace." Again, in Dr. Bright's words, "Grace is a force in the spiritual order, not simply God's unmerited kindness in the abstract, but such kindness in action as a movement of His Spirit within the soul, resulting from the Incarnation, and imparting to the will and the affections a new capacity of obedience and of love." And yet once more, Dr. Liddon writes, "Grace is not simply kindly feeling on the part of God, but a positive boon conferred on man. Grace is a real and active force: it is the power that worketh in us, illuminating the intellect, warming the heart, strengthening the will of redeemed humanity. It is the might of the everlasting Spirit, renovating man by uniting him, whether immediately or through the sacraments, to the sacred Manhood of the Word Incarnate." Such is grace as a Christian thinks of it and lives by it. It is the work, the presence of God the Holy Ghost in us, bringing to us all that our Saviour died and rose again to win for us. But here we are moving upon ground which may be resolutely denied to us. The doctrine of grace is as little congenial to natural reason, or to a superficial view of human life, as is the doctrine of the Fall. But here too, I believe, a deeper and more appreciative study of the facts betrays the working of some power, for which it is very difficult to account by any merely natural estimate. As the truth of original sin is at once the most obscure and the most illuminating of mysteries; as all the phenomenon of sinful history forces us back to that imperceptible point, where by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin: so may grace be said to be at once the most inscrutable and the most certain of all the forces that enter into the course of life. The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh and whither it goeth; but as the great trees sway like reeds, as the clouds scud across the sky, as the ship leaps forward over the waves and strains towards the haven, you do not doubt the reality of the force that is astir. And grace, the great energy in the spiritual order; grace, the Almighty Power of God in the wills of its reasonable creatures, has its phenomena, its effects, at least as real, as difficult to deny or to explain away — though not so difficult to ignore — as such tokens of the viewless wind. Alciphron, the minute philosopher of Bishop Berkeley's dialogue, the witty and freethinking gentleman of his day, assails Christianity from this very ground. Grace, he truly says is the main point in the Christian dispensation; but then he complains thus: "At the request of a philosophical friend, I did cast an eye on the writings he showed me of some divines, and talked with others on this subject, but after all I had read or heard could make nothing of it, having always found whenever I laid aside the word grace and looked into my own mind a perfect vacuity or privation of all ideas." And he adds with ingenuous self-confidence: "As I am apt to think men's minds and faculties are made much alike, I suspect that other men, if they examine what they call grace with exactness and indifference, would agree with me that there was nothing in it but an empty name." Alciphron is opposed by Euphanor with an argument which is quite sufficient for its purpose. He is invited to contemplate force as he had contemplated grace, "itself in its own precise idea," excluding the consideration of its subject and effects; and here, too, he is compelled to discover the same mental vacuity and privation; he closes his eyes and muses a few minutes, and declares that he can make nothing of it: — and so his contention, if it has any value, would involve the denial of force as well as grace; and for this he is not prepared. But what strange narrowness of horizon; what failure of sympathy and imagination; what readiness to be soon contented with one's own account of one's own fragment of the world — is shown when Alciphron or any one else can think that there is nothing to be found or studied where Christians speak of grace; that "a perfect vacuity and privation of ideas" is a philosophic state of mind in regard to it; that it can be dismissed with scorn or compassion as a mere empty name. For grace is not offered for attention and consideration as a mere subjective phenomenon, simply an experience of the inner life, supported by a bare assertion, incapable of tests and evidence; no, it has its facts to point to, its results written in the history of men and patent in their daily life; its achievements, accredited to it by those who were certainly nearest to the occurrences, achievements hardly to be explained away, and never to be ignored by any mind that claims the temper of philosophy. The effects assigned to grace in life and history are as serious and distinct, as necessarily to be recognised and dealt with, as the effects of force, or sin, or passion. Take but one great instance out of history. When the power, the dignity, the character of Rome was breaking up; when poets and historians had seen and spoken out the plain truth that society was sinking down and down, from bad to worse; when all the principles of national or individual greatness seemed discredited and confused, when vice in naked shamelessness was seizing upon tract after tract of human life — then suddenly the whole drift of moral history, the whole aspect of the fight was changed. A new force appeared upon the scene. "It seems to me," says the Dean of St. Paul's, that the exultation apparent in early Christian literature, beginning with the Apostolic Epistles, at the prospect now at length disclosed, within the bounds of a sober hope, of a great moral revolution in human life, that the rapturous confidence which pervades these Christian ages, that at last the routine of vice and sin has met its match, that a new and astonishing possibility has come within view, that men, not here and there, but on a large scale, might attain to that hitherto hopeless thing to the multitudes, — goodness, — is one of the most singular and solemn things in history." "The monotony of deepening debasement," "the spell and custom of evil" was broken now, and "an awful rejoicing transport filled the souls of men as they saw that there was the chance, more than the chance, the plain fore-running signs, of human nature becoming here, what none had ever dared it would become, morally better." That was a real achievement, if anything in history is real. Such is the unanimous witness of all those through whose lives and labour God wrought that mighty work, and renewed the face of the earth. That rallying of all hope, that surprising reassertion of goodness against the confident tyranny of evil, was the work of grace. Grace was the power that came in and turned the issue of the fight, the tide of human history. His grace is sufficient for us; His grace which day by day does change the hearts and lives of man; His grace which gives the poor their wondrous patience and simplicity and trust; His grace which can uphold a patient, self-distrustful woman through the dreariest and most revolting tasks of charity and compassion; His grace which holds His servants' wills resolute and unflagging through the utmost stress of overwork and suffering, on in the very hours of sickness, on into the very face of depth; His grace which changes pride to penitence and humility, which wins the sensual to chastity, the intemperate to self-control, the hard and thankless to the brightness of a gentle life. His grace which everywhere, in the stillness where He loves to work, is disentangling the souls of men from the clinging hindrances of sin, repairing, bit by bit, the ruin of our fall, renewing to all and more than all its primal beauty, that image and likeness of Almighty God, in which at the first He fashioned man to be the lord, the priest, the prophet of the world. So is His grace ever working, striving round about us: so is it ever ready to work and strive and win, be sure, in each of us. No aim is too high, no task too great, no sin too strong, no trial too hard for those who patiently and humbly rest upon God's grace: who wait on Him that He may renew their strength.

(Dean Paget, D. D.)

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KJV: For this thing I besought the Lord thrice, that it might depart from me.

WEB: Concerning this thing, I begged the Lord three times that it might depart from me.