If Christ provides only a part of our salvation, leaving us to provide the rest, then we are still hopeless under the load of sin. For no matter how small the gap which must be bridged before salvation can be attained, the awakened conscience sees clearly that our wretched attempt at goodness is insufficient even to bridge that gap. The guilty soul enters again into the hopeless reckoning with God, to determine whether we have really done our part.

—J. Gresham Machen, Christianity and Liberalism, New Edition. (Grand Rapids; Cambridge, U.K.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2009), 21.