And then, as if to make our salvation a very hyperbole of impossibility, the all but almighty power of indwelling sin comes in.
Have you ever tried to break loose from the old fetter of an evil habit?
Have you ever said on a New Year's Day with Thomas A Kempis that this year you would root that appetite,--naming it,--out of your body, and that vice,--naming it,--out of your heart?
Have you ever sworn at the Communion table that you would watch and pray, and set a watch on your evil heart against that envy, and that revenge, and that ill-will, and that distaste, dislike, and antipathy?
Then your minister will not need to come back from his death-bed to preach to you on the difficulty of salvation.
4.

And yet such is the grace of God, such is the work of Christ, and such is the power and the patience of the Holy Ghost that, if we had only an adequate ministry in our pulpits, and an assisting literature in our homes, even this three-fold impossibility would be overcome and we would be saved.

But if the ministry that is set over us is an ignorant, indolent, incompetent, self-deceived ministry; if our own chosen, set-up, and maintained minister is himself an uninstructed, unspiritual, unsanctified man; and if the books we buy and borrow and read are all secular, unspiritual, superficial, ephemeral, silly, stupid, impertinent books, then the impossibility of our salvation is absolute, and we are as good as in hell already with all our guilt and all our corruption for ever on our heads.

Now, that was the exact case of Mansoul in the allegory of the Holy War at one of the last and acutest stages of that war.

Or, rather, that would have been her exact case had Diabolus got his own deep, diabolical way with her.