THE KING’S BUSINESS
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through the discovery of their guilt. It * was not the awful penalty which menaces the impenitent that haunted and terrified them. Nor was their distress occasioned chiefly by the consciuosness of moral evil. They feared the penalty, and they were humiliated and shamed by the contrast between ideal goodness and their own moral and spiritual life; but what stung and tor tured them, sunk them into despair, filled heaven and earth with a darkness that could be felt, and made life intolerable, was their guilt—guilt which they had incurred by their past sins, and which they contin ued to incur by their present sinfulness. HARD TO SHAKE OFF When once this sense of guilt fastens itself on a man, he cannot shake it off at will. The keen agony may gradually pass into a dull, dead pain; and after a time, the sensibility of the soul may seem to ;be wholly lost; but a man can never be sure that the horror will not return. The real nature of this experience is best seen when it has been occasioned by the grosser and more violent forms of crime. Men who have committed murder, for example, have been driven almost insane by the memory of their evil deed. Their agony may have had nothing in it of the nature of repentance; they were riot distressed because their crime had revealed to them the malignity and the fierce strength of their passions; they had no desire to become gentle and kindly. They were filled with horror and remorse by their awful guilt. They felt that the crime was theirs, and would always continue to be theirs; that it would be theirs if it remained concealed as truly as if it were known; indeed, it seemed to be in some terrible way more truly theirs so long as . the secret was kept. It was not the fear of punishment that convulsed them; they have sometimes' brought on themselves public indignation and abhorrence, and have condemned themselves to the. gallows by confessing their crime in order to obtain relief from their agony. Suppose that a man possessed by this
great horror discovered that, in some won derful way, the dark and damning stain on his conscience had disappeared; that, although he had done the deed, the iron chain which bound him to the criminality of it had been broken; that before God and rrian and his own conscience he was free from the guilt of it—the supposition, in its completeness, is an impossible one; but if it were possible, the discovery would lift the man out of the darkness of hell into the light of heaven. TRUST IN CHRIST But to large numbers of Christian men a discovery which in substance is identical with this has actually come in response to •their trust in Christ. Nothing is more intensely real than the sense of guilt; it is as real as the eternal distinction between right and wrong in which it is rooted. And nothing is more intensely real than the sense of release from guilt which comes from the discovery and assurance of the remission of sins. The evil things which a man has done cannot be undone; but when they have been forgiven through Christ, the iron chain which so Found him to them as to make the guilt of them eter nally his has been broken; before God and his conscience he is no longer guilty of them. , This is the Christian mystery of justification which, according to Paul—and his words have been confirmed in the expe rience of millions of Christian men—is “the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth.” It changes darkness into light; despair into victorious hope; pros tration into buoyancy and vigor. It is one of the supreme motives to Christian living, and it makes Christian living possible. The man who has received this great deliver ance is no longer a convict, painfully observing all prison rules with the hope of shortening his sentence, but a child in the home of God. There are experiences of another kind by which the faith of Christian men is ver ified. Of the'se one of the most, decisive and most wonderful is the consciousness that through Christ he has passed into the
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