For the Reformation is nothing other than Augustianianism come to its rights: the turning away from all that is human to rest on God alone for salvation.

Where the Spirit is, there is the church; outside the body of the saints there is no salvation.

Religion does not take a man away from his work; it sends him to his work with an added quality of devotion.

When Melanchthon toyed with such ambiguous phrases as “God draws the willing to him,” “Free will is man’s power to apply himself to grace, he was playing with fire.

In your case, there can be no ‘either-or’ here – either a student or a man of God. You must be both.

As supernaturalism is the mark of Christianity at large, and evangelicalism the mark of Protestantism, so particularism is the mark of Calvinism.

The Calvinist is he who holds with full consciousness that God the Lord, in his saving operations, deals not generally with mankind at large, but particularly with the individuals who are actually saved.

The issue is indeed a fundamental one and it is closely drawn. Is it God the Lord that saves us, or is it we ourselves? And does God the Lord save us, or does he merely open the way to salvation, and leave it according to our choice, to walk in it or not? The parting of the ways is the old parting of the ways between Christianity and autosoterism. Certainly only he can claim to be evangelical who with full consciousness rests entirely and directly on God and on God alone for his salvation.

Our self-abnegation is thus not for our own sake, but for the sake of others. And thus it is not to mere self-denial that Christ calls us, but specifically to self-sacrifice: not to unselfing ourselves, but to unselfishing ourselves.

The best service we can offer to God is just to do our duty-our plain, homely duty, whatever that may chance to be.