T HE K I N G ' S B U S I N E S S mind, every word spoken, every action performed—penetrating into motive and regulating affection—and the estimate we form of their breadth and depth may become very different. It is in Christ, however, the Perfect Revealer of the spirituality of the law, and at the same time the Personal Embodiment of its holiness, that we come supremely to comprehend how vast and wide, how profound, how searching, the command ment of God is. “I am not come,” said Jesus, “to destroy, but to fulfil,” The commandment is “old,” but it is also “new,” for it has become “true” (real ised) in Him and in His people. To the metaphysical, as to the scienti fic mind, however, there is a fascination in the idea of universal causation—of unbroken law—which almost resistlessly compels it to the rejection of free-will, and' the adoption of a Determinism as rigorous as that of physical nature. If is not only “miracle!’ that the modern philosopher rejects, but free-agency. Materialistic and Pantheistic Systems are of necessity deterministic. The re sult reached by the different roads is the same—that “Free-will,” in any sense that gives it meaning in a moral system, is got rid of. Therewith, as we have sought to show, modern thought comes into conflict with irrefragable data of consciousness, and does violence to the 'august authority of moral law. God ip “the Holy One”—the alone “Good” in the absolute sense,—and it is only when sin is lifted up into the light of this moral glory of God’s character that its full enormity and hatefulness are disclosed. The divine' holiness is a postulate of the Christian doctrine of sin. It is this awful moral purity of God, —this light of holiness in presence of which evil cannot stand,—which, in the Old Testament, is God’s chief glory; in the New Testament its sublimity, while as fully recognized, is softened by the gentler radiance of love. Only as holi ness is morally conceived, has the com
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mand, “Be ye holy, for I am holy,” any meaning. It is in the light of the revela tion of God’s holiness that man comes to know himself as sinful, and has set be fore him an ideal of holiness to which he aspires. A sense of responsibility of peculiar sacredness is developed. The very elevation to which duty is now raised—the consciousness of new duties to God, the call to love, trust, and wor ship—exalt the moral ideal, while they deepen the sense of personal unworthi ness. Vastly greater are the effects pro duced, when to the quickening of natu ral conscience is added the disclosure of God’s own character as holy and gra cious in the words and deeds of his spe cial revelation. The supreme revelation of God’s holiness, however, as of every thing else in God, is again that given in Christ—the holy and incarnate Son. Be the process of development what one will, the result is indubitable: God is conceived of in Christianity as the ab solutely ethically perfect Being—the Holy God, if also the God of Fatherly Love, to whom moral impurity in every form and degree is abhorrent. Against sin, from eternity to eternity, the holy God cannot but declare Himself. “Wrath” is not extraneous to His nature, but is a vital element in His perfection. “Our God is a consuming fire.” But judg ment is no delight to Him and the ultim ate end which holiness strives after is, not the destruction of the sinner, but the restoration of the divine image, and the union of all beings in love. It must now be apparent how deeply the idea of the divine holiness enters into the Christian conception of sin. Where this idea is absent, there may still, from the promptings of the natural conscience, be a sense of sin and guilt, moving to penitential utterances, and to acts for the removal of that guilt. There can never, however, be the same sense of sin’s awful evil, and of its hatefulness in the sight of God, as where, in the light of revelation, God is truly known,
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