to God, a fearful apprehension of penal consequences here, and, if there be a hereafter, there, too.  The sickness of soul and the perils that threaten life, flow from the central fact of sin, and salvation consists, negatively, in the sweeping away of all of these, whether the sin itself, or the fatal facility with which we yield to it, or the desolation and perversion which it brings into all the faculties and susceptibilities, or the perversion of relation to God, and the consequent evils, here and hereafter, which throng around the evil-doer.  The sick man is healed, and the man in peril is set in safety.

But, besides that, there is a great deal more.  The cure is incomplete till the full tide of health follows convalescence.  When God saves, He does not only bar up the iron gate through which the hosts of evil rush out upon the defenceless soul, but He flings wide the golden gate through which the glad troops of blessings and of graces flock around the delivered spirit, and enrich it with all joys and with all beauties.  So the positive side of salvation is the investiture of the saved man with throbbing health through all his veins, and the strength that comes from a divine life.  It is the bestowal upon the delivered man of everything that he needs for blessedness and for duty.  All good conferred, and every evil banned back into its dark den, such is the Christian conception of salvation.  It is much that the negative should be accomplished, but it is little in comparison with the rich fulness of positive endowments, of happiness, and of holiness which make an integral part of the salvation of God.

This, then, being the one side, what about the other?  If this be salvation, its precise opposite is the Scriptural idea of ‘perishing.’  Utter ruin lies in the word, the entire failure to be what God meant a man to be.  That is in it, and no contortions of arbitrary interpretation can knock that solemn significance out of the dreadful expression.  If salvation be the cure of the sickness, perishing is the fatal end of the unchecked disease.  If salvation be the deliverance from the outstretched claws of the harpy evils that crowd about the trembling soul, then perishing is the fixing of their poisoned talons into their prey, and their rending of it into fragments.

Of course that is metaphor, but no metaphor can be half so dreadful as the plain, prosaic fact that the exact opposite of the salvation, which consists in the healing from sin and the deliverance from danger, and in the endowment with all gifts good and beautiful, is the Christian idea of the alternative ‘perishing.’  Then it means the disease running its course.  It means the dangers laying hold of the man in peril.  It means the withdrawal, or the non-bestowal, of all which is good, whether it be good of holiness or good of happiness.  It does not mean, as it seems to me, the cessation of conscious existence, any more than salvation means the bestowal of conscious existence.