Consider:
I. The condition to which man has reduced himself by transgression, which makes "the power of God unto salvation" the pressing and constant need of his soul. Power is of God, because power is life, and life is of God. If power be gone, God only can renew it. Man is manifestly godlike in the serene composure of his being; he knows the struggles to live up to it, yet falls back into the gloom of the nether abyss. It is a sight of unspeakable piteousness. It would be an agony to angels, it would be an agony to Christ if His mighty arm were not nigh with salvation.
II. What evidence upon this point the pagan systems supply. I believe that, regarded in their very highest aspect that is, in the light of their aspirings and strivings they are solemn witnesses to this want of spiritual power, by their very efforts to supply it, and to generate that force which can come forth from God alone. It is very easy to use the word idol as a word of scorn; but it is not so easy to define clearly what it means, and to explain the place which it occupies in history. The world's idolatries are the nurses of the most grinding tyranny and the most disgusting sensuality. This is their universal character; to this they inevitably incline. But if any man supposes that idolatries were invented for the express purpose of promoting sensuality and tyranny, by giving them a heavenly sanction, he places himself at a point of view from which it is simply impossible that he can understand humanity and the gospel. The Gentile idolatries were the power of man, striving at first in the true direction, though in sinful, guilty ignorance of the true God, who is "not far from any one of us," but mastered to the end, like all that is born of the will of the flesh, by corrupting elements, and made thereby ministers of widespread desolations and death. The pagan was suffered to feel after God, because God was preparing to reveal Himself. The world was suffered to grope in its darkness, for already the gates of the East were opening, and the flush of the rising daystar began to glow over the world.
J. Baldwin Brown, The Divine Life in Man,p. 70.
The Essential Nature of Salvation.
I. There is no safety but in soundness, and wherever there is soundness there must be ultimate safety. These two principles are comprehended in the original sense of the words, both in Greek and Latin, which are rendered by the one word salvation. But I believe that in the view of sound philosophy, as well as in etymology, the meaning of health-wholeness is the fundamental one, and that we shall get into much mischief, in spiritual things at any rate, if we look at the matter in any other way. He who would save man must heal him: in other words, he must re-quicken that vital power which man lost at the Fall, the re-quickening of which will be regeneration and salvation.
II. Salvation isa deliverance an escape from death and hell. Salvation isthe possession of a complete and imperishable bliss. But there is that in it which underlies both these conditions, and through which alone they can be completely realised; and that is the gradual unfolding of the Divine life in the soul the recovery by the soul of that vital force which in its rudiment man lost in Eden, and which in its maturity man regains in Christ. "The just shall live by faith." That is the basis on which the doctrinal structure rests. Life was lost in the Fall. Life is recovered in Christ; to live in Christ is to be saved. To know Him, to be capable of knowing His mind, and sympathising with His heart, and delighting in His work throughout eternity, is to be blessed in all the boundless blessedness of heaven. But everything depends on our regarding faith, not as a dead condition which any other term might as well supply, but as a vital act; just as vital a relation to the spiritual being as the appropriation and assimilation of the bread which perishes is to the life of the body in this present world. We live by the bread which perishes, as to the body; we live by Christ, the bread of life, as to the spirit. The sense of the body is the organ by which the outward bread is appropriated for its sustenance; faith is the corresponding organ by which, in the inner man, Christ is received with the nourishment of the soul.
J. Baldwin Brown, The Divine Life in Man,p. 122.
References: Romans 1:16; Romans 1:17. Clergyman's Magazine,vol. i., p. 161; H. W. Beecher, Christian World Pulpit,vol. xiii., p. 364.