Monday is for Machen

We saw in a previous post the central role played by Machen's mother in building a foundation of faith as a child. Later, she helped him withstand the doubts of his university years, including this wonderful bit of gospel comfort.

Another thing used to be said to me by my mother in those dark hours when the lamp burned dim, when I thought that faith had gone and shipwreck had been made of my soul. "Christ," she used to say, "keeps firmer hold on us than we keep on Him."

That means, at least, when translated into wordly terms, that we ought to distrust our moods. Many a man has fallen into despair because, losing the heavenly vision for the moment, passing through the dull lowlands of life, he takes such experience as though it were permanent, and deserts a well-grounded conviction which was the real foundation of his life. Faith is often diversified by doubt, but a man should not desert the conviction of his better moments because the dark moments come.

But my mother's word meant something far deeper than all that. It meant rather that salvation by faith does not mean that we are saved because we keep ourselves at every moment in an ideally perfect attitude of confidence in Christ. No, we are saved because, having once been united to Christ by faith, we are His forever. Calvinism is a very comforting doctrine indeed. Without its comfort, I think I would have perished long ago in the castle of Giant Despair.

J. Gresham Machen, Christianity in Conflict