WORK out your own salvation, with fear and trembling. This injunction does not mean what, to a great many minds, it seems to mean. In some parts of the country, a tax for the keeping of the roads in repair can be paid in cash, or it can be "worked out;"—that is, it can be paid by personal labor. So, land owners often "work out" their highway tax. It is not that kind of working out that this text refers to. No man can secure his salvation by work, even with fear and trembling, and in prayers and tears. Again, there is a custom of working out a farm rent on shares. The farmer does all the work, and takes half the result, the other half going to the farm owner. It is not that kind of working out one's salvation that is here meant. Salvation is not secured from God on shares. It is wholly the gift of God, and all the work in the world could never merit nor obtain any portion of it. But he who has salvation, he who is saved by grace through faith (and this letter of Paul is to persons in that state), has a duty to work out in the line of his salvation; to keep right at the work which is along the course, and in the direction of the end, of God's plan of grace. It might, perhaps, give light to this text to change the figure from the farmer to the soldier, and read it, Fight out—or fight on—your enlistment with fear and trembling. Now that you have enlisted, and are accepted as a soldier, keep right at the soldier business, and do it with such zealous earnestness that you will be all of a tremble in your anxious desire to do it just as it should be done. There is no danger of any over-reliance on one's personal activity in such working, or such fighting, as this, in the line of one's redemption from sin and its curse, here in this world of probation and trial.—Sel.