 Chapter 7 of Unspoken Cermons, Series 3. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Unspoken Cermons by George MacDonald. Justice! Also unto thee, O Lord Belongeth mercy, for thou renderest to every man according to his work. Psalm 62 verse 12. Some of the translators make it kindness and goodness, but I presume there is no real difference among them as to the character of the word which here in the English Bible is translated mercy. The religious mind, however, educated upon the theories yet prevailing in the so-called religious world, must here recognize a departure from the presentation to which they have been accustomed. To make the Psalm speak according to prevalent theoretic modes, the verse would have to be changed to thus. To thee, O Lord Belongeth, justice, for thou renderest to every man according to his work. Let the reason of my choosing this passage, so remarkable in itself for a model to the sermon which follows, remain for the present doubtful. I need hardly to say that I mean to found no logical argument upon it. Let us endeavor to see plainly what we mean when we use the word justice, and whether we mean what we ought to mean when we use it, especially with reference to God. Let us come nearer to knowing what we ought to understand by justice, that is, the justice of God. For his justice is the live, active justice, giving existence to the idea of justice in our minds and hearts. Because he is just, we are capable of knowing justice. It is because he is just, that we have the idea of justice so deeply embedded in us. What do we often mean by justice? Is it not the carrying out of the law, the infliction of penalty assigned to offence? By a just judge we mean a man who administers the law without prejudice, without a favor or dislike, and where guilt is manifest punishes as much as and no more than the law has in the case laid down. It may not be that justice has therefore been done. The law itself may be unjust, and the judge may mistake, or which is more likely, the working of the law may be foiled by the parasites of law for their own gain. But even if the law be good and thoroughly administered, it does not necessarily follow that justice is done. Suppose my watch has been taken from my pocket. I lay hold of the thief, he is dragged before the magistrate, proved guilty, and sentenced to a just imprisonment. Must I walk home satisfied with the result? Have I had justice done me? The thief may have had justice done him, but where is my watch? That is gone, and I remain a man wronged. Who has done me the wrong? The thief. Who can set right the wrong? The thief, and only the thief, nobody but the man that did the wrong. One may be able to move the man to right the wrong, but God himself cannot right it without the man. Suppose my watch found and restored. Is the account settled between me and the thief? I may forgive him, but is the wrong removed? By no means. But suppose the thief to thank himself to repent. He has, we shall say, put it out of his power to return the watch, but he comes to me and says he is sorry he stole it, and begs me to accept for the present what little he is able to bring as a beginning of atonement. How should I then regard the matter? Should I not feel that he had gone far to make atonement? Done more to make up for the injury he had inflicted upon me than the mere restoration of the watch even by himself could reach to? Would there not lie in the thief's confession and submission and initial restoration and appeal to the divinest in me to the eternal brotherhood? Would it not indeed amount to a sufficing atonement as between man and man? If he offered to bear what I chose to lay upon him, should I feel it necessary for the sake of justice to inflict some certain suffering as demanded by righteousness? I should still have a claim upon him for my watch, but should I not be apt to forget it? He who commits the offense can make up for it, and he alone. One thing must surely be plain, that the punishment of the wrong doer makes no atonement for the wrong done. How could it make up for me for the stealing of my watch that the man was punished? The wrong would be there all the same. I am not saying the man ought not to be punished, far from it. I am only saying that the punishment no wise makes up to the man wronged. Would it force the man with the watch in his pocket or to inflict the severest flagellation on himself? Would that lessen my sense of injury? Would it set anything right? Would it anyway atone? Would it give him a right to the watch? Punishments may do good to the man who does the wrong, but that is a thing as different as important. Another thing plain is that even without the material rectification of the wrong where that is impossible, repentance removes the offense which no suffering could. I at least should feel that I had no more quarrel with the man. I should even feel that the gift he had made me, giving into my heart a repentant brother, was infinitely beyond the restitution of what he had taken from me. True he owed me both himself and the watch, but such a greater does more than include such a less. If it be objected, you may forgive, but the man has sinned against God. Then it is not a part of the divine to be merciful I return, and a man may be more merciful than his maker. A man may do that which would be too merciful in God. Then mercy is not a divine attribute, for it may exceed and be too much. It must not be infinite, therefore cannot be God's own. He may be against justice. Never if you mean by justice what I mean by justice. If anything be against justice it cannot be called mercy, for it is cruelty. To thee, O Lord Belongeth, mercy, for thou renderest to every man according to his work. There is no opposition, no strife whatever between mercy and justice. Those who say justice means the punishing of sin and mercy the not punishing of sin and a tribute to both to God would make a schism in the very idea of God. And this brings me to the question, what is meant by divine justice? Divine justice may be a poor distortion of justice, a mere shadow of it, but the justice of God must be perfect. We cannot frustrate it in its working. Are we just to it in our idea of it? If you ask any ordinary Sunday congregation in England what is meant by the justice of God would not 19 out of 20 answer that it means his punishing of sin. Look for a moment what degree of justice it would indicate in a man that he punished every wrong. A Roman emperor, a Turkish coddy might do that, and be the most unjust of men and judges. Ahab might be just on the throne of punishment, and in his garden the murderer of Naboth. In God shall we imagine a distinction of office and character. God is one, and the depth of foolishness is reached by that theology which talks of God as if he held different offices and differed in each. It sets a contradiction in the very nature of God himself. It represents him for instance as having to do that as a magistrate which as a father he would not do. The love of the father makes him desire to be unjust as a magistrate. Oh, the folly of any mind that would explain God before obeying him, that would map out the character of God instead of crying, Lord, what would thou have me to do? God is no magistrate. But if he were it would be a position to which his fatherhood alone gave him the right. His right as a father cover every right he can be analytically supposed to possess. The justice of God is this, that to use a boyish phrase, the best the language will now afford me because of misuse, he gives every man, woman, child, and beast everything that has been fair play. He renders to every man according to his work, and therein lies his perfect mercy. For nothing else could be merciful to the man and nothing but mercy could be fair to him. God does nothing of which any just man, the things that fairly and fully before him so that he understood, would not say, that is fair. Who would, I repeat, say a man was a just man because he insisted on prosecuting every offender? A scoundrel might do that. Yet the justice of God, forsooth, is his punishment of sin. A just man is one who cares and tries and always tries to give fair play to everyone in everything. When we speak of the justice of God, let us see that we do mean justice. Punishment of the guilty may be involved in justice, but it does not constitute the justice of God one atom more than it would constitute the justice of a man. But no one ever doubts that God gives fair play. That may be, but does not go for much, if you say that God does this or that which is not fair. If he does it, you may be sure it is fair. Doubtless, or he could not be God, except to devils. But you say, he does so and so, and is just. I say, he does not do so and so, and is just. You say, he does for the Bible says so. I say, if the Bible said so, the Bible would lie. But the Bible does not say so. The Lord of life complains of men for not judging right. To say on the authority of the Bible that God does a thing no honorable man would do is a lie against God. To say that it is therefore right is to lie against the very spirit of God. To uphold a lie for God's sake is to be against God, not for him. God cannot be lied for. He is the truth. The truth alone is on his side. While his child could not see the rectitude of a thing, he would infinitely rather, even if the thing were right, have him say, God could not do that thing. Even have him believe that he did it. If the man were sure God did it, the thing he ought to say would be, then there must be something about it I do not know, for if I did know I should see the thing quite differently. But where an evil thing is invented to explain and account for a good thing and a lover of God is called upon to believe the invention or be cast out, he needs not mind being cast out, for it is into the company of Jesus. Where there is no ground to believe that God does a thing except that men who would explain God have believed and taught it, he is not a true man who accepts men against his own conscience of God. I acknowledge no authority calling upon me to believe a thing of God which I could not be a man and believe right in my fellow man. I will accept no explanation of any way of God which explanation involves what I should scorn as false and unfair in a man. If you say, that may be right of God to do, which it would not be right of man to do. I answer, yes, because the relation of the maker to his creatures is very different from the relation of one of those creatures to another, and he has therefore duties toward his creatures requiring of him what no man would have the right to do to his fellow man, but he can have no duty that is not both just and merciful. More is required of the maker by his own act of creation than can be required of men. More and higher justice and righteousness is required of him by himself, the truth, greater nobleness, more penetrating sympathy, and nothing but what, if an honest man understood it, he would say was right. If it be a thing man cannot understand, then man can say nothing as to whether it is right or wrong. He cannot even know that God does it when the it is unintelligible to him. What he calls it may be but the smallest facet of a composite action. His part is silence. If it be said by any that God does a thing, and the thing seems to me unjust, then either I do not know what the thing is, or God does not do it. The saying cannot mean what it seems to mean, or the saying is not true. If for instance it be said that God visits the sin of the fathers on the children, a man who takes visits upon to mean punishes, and the children to mean the innocent children ought to say, either I do not understand the statement, or the thing is not true whoever says it. God may do what seems to a man not right, but it must so seem to him because God works on higher, on divine, on perfect principles to write for a selfish, unfair, or unloving man to understand. But least of all must we accept some low notion of justice in a man, and argue that God is just in doing after that notion. The common idea then is that the justice of God consists in punishing sin. It is in the hope of giving a larger idea of the justice of God in punishing sin that I ask, why is God bound to punish sin? How could he be a just God and not punish sin? Mercy is a good and right thing, I answer, and but for sin there could be no mercy. We are enjoined to forgive, to be merciful, to be as our Father in heaven. True right cannot possibly be opposed to each other. If God punish sin, it must be merciful to punish sin. And if God forgives sin, it must be just to forgive sin. We are required to forgive with the argument that our Father forgives. It must, I say, be right to forgive. Every attribute of God must be infinite as himself. He cannot be sometimes merciful, and not always merciful. He cannot be just, and not always just. Mercy belongs to him and needs no contrivance of theologic chicanery to justify it. Then you mean that it is wrong to punish sin, therefore God does not punish sin? By no means. God does punish sin. But there is no opposition between punishment and forgiveness. The one may be essential to the possibility of the other. Why, I repeat, does God punish sin? That is my point. Because in itself sin deserves punishment. Then how can he tell us to forgive it? He punishes, and having punished, he forgives. That will hardly do. If sin demands punishment and the righteous punishment is given, then the man is free. Why should he be forgiven? He needs forgiveness because no amount of punishment will meet his deserts. I avoid for the present, as anyone may perceive, the probable expansion of this reply. Then why not forgive him at once if the punishment is not essential, if part can be pretermitted? And again, can that be required, which, according to your showing, is not adequate? You will perhaps answer, God may please to take what little he can have. And this brings me to the fault in the whole idea. Punishment is no wise and offset to sin. Most people sometimes, in a tone of self-gratulatory pity, will say, if I have sinned, I have suffered. Yes, verily. But what of that? What merit is there in it? Even had you laid the suffering upon yourself, what did you do to make up for the wrong? That you may have bettered by your suffering is well for you. But what atonement is there in the suffering? The notion is a false one altogether. Punishment, deserved suffering, is no equipoise to sin. It is no use laying it on the other scale. It will not move it a hair's breadth. Suffering weighs nothing at all against sin. It is not of the same kind, not under the same laws any more than mind and matter. We say a man deserves punishment, but when we forgive and do not punish him, we do not always feel that we have done wrong. Whether when we do punish him do we feel that any amends has been made for his wrongdoing. If it were an offset to wrong, then God would be bound to punish for the sake of punishment. But that cannot be, for God forgives. Then it is not for the sake of the punishment as a thing that in itself ought to be done, but for the sake of something else as a means to an end that God punishes. It is not directly for justice, else how could he show mercy, for that would involve injustice. Primarily, God is not bound to punish sin. He is bound to destroy sin. If he were not the maker, he might not be bound to destroy sin. I do not know. But seeing he has created creatures who have sinned, and therefore sin has by the creating act of God come into the world, God is, in his own righteousness, bound to destroy sin. But that is to have no mercy. You mistake. God does destroy sin. He is always destroying sin. In him I trust that he is destroying sin in me. He is always saving the sinner from his sins, and that is destroying sin. But vengeance on the sinner, the law of a tooth for a tooth, is not in the heart of God, neither in his hand. If the sinner and the sin in him are the concrete object of the divine wrath, then indeed there can be no mercy. Then indeed there will be an end put to sin by the destruction of the sin and the sinner together. But thus would no atonement be wrought. Nothing be done to make up for the wrong God has allowed to come into being by creating man. There must be an atonement, a making up, a bringing together, an atonement which I say cannot be made except by the man who has sinned. Punishment, I repeat, is not the thing required of God, but the absolute destruction of sin. What better is the world? What better is the sinner? What better is God? What better is the truth that the sinner should suffer, continue suffering to all eternity? Would there be less sin in the universe? Would there be any making up for sin? Would it show God justified in doing what he knew would bring sin into the world, justified in making creatures who he knew would sin? What setting right would come of the sinner's suffering? If justice demanded, if suffering be the equivalent for sin, then the sinner must suffer. Then God is bound to exact his suffering and not pardon, and so the making of man was a tyrannical deed, a creative cruelty. But grant that the sinner has deserved to suffer. No amount of suffering is any atonement for his sin. To suffer to all eternity could not make up for one unjust word. Does that mean, then, that for an unjust word I deserve to suffer to all eternity? The unjust word is an eternally evil thing. Nothing but God in my heart can cleanse me from the evil that uttered it. But does it follow that I saw the evil of what I did so perfectly that eternal punishment for it would be just? Sorrow and confession and self-abasing love will make up for the evil word. Suffering will not. For evil in the abstract nothing can be done. It is eternally evil. But I may be saved from it by learning to loathe it, to hate it, to shrink from it with an eternal avoidance. The only vengeance worth having on sin is to make the sinner himself its executioner. Sin and punishment are in no antagonism to each other in man any more than pardon and punishment are in God. They can perfectly coexist. The one naturally follows the other, punishment being born of sin because evil exists only by the life of good and has no life of its own being in itself death. Sin and suffering are not natural opposites. The opposite of evil is good, not suffering. The opposite of sin is not suffering but righteousness. The path across the gulf that divides right from wrong is not the fire but repentance. If my friend has wronged me, will it console me to see him punished? Will that be a rendering to me of my due? Will his agony be a balm to my deep wound? Should I be fit for any friendship if that were possible even in regard to my enemy? But would not the shadow of repentant grief, the light of reviving love on his countenance heal it at once, however deep? Take any of those wicked people in Dante's hell and ask wherein is justice served by their punishment. Mind, I am not saying it is not right to punish them. I am saying that justice is not, never can be satisfied by suffering. Nay cannot have any satisfaction in or from suffering. Human resentment, human revenge, human hate may. Such justice as Dante's keeps wickedness alive in its most terrible forms. The life of God goes forth to inform or at least give a home to victorious evil. Is he not defeated every time that one of those lost souls defies him? All hell cannot make Vanny Fucci say, I was wrong. God is triumphantly defeated, I say, throughout the hell of his vengeance. Although against evil it is but the vain and wasted cruelty of a tyrant. There is no destruction of evil thereby, but an enhancing of its horrible power in the midst of the most agonizing and disgusting tortures a divine imagination can invent. If sin must be kept alive, then hell must be kept alive. But while I regard the smallest sin as infinitely loathsome, I do not believe that any being, never good enough to see the essential ugliness of sin, could sin so as to deserve such punishment. I am not now, however, dealing with the question of the duration of punishment, but with the idea of punishment itself, and would only say in passing that the notion that a creature born imperfect, nay, born with impulses to evil, not of his own generating, and which he could not help having, a creature to whom the true face of God was never presented and by whom it never could have been seen, should be thus condemned, is as loathsome a lie against God as could find place in heart to undeveloped, to understand what justice is, and too low to look up into the face of Jesus. It never in truth found place in any heart, though in many a pedifogging brain. There is but one thing lower than deliberately to believe such a lie, and that is to worship the God of whom it is believed. The one deepest, highest, truest, fittest, most wholesome suffering must be generated in the wicked by a vision, a true sight more or less adequate, of the hideousness of their lives, of the horror of the wrongs they have done. Physical suffering may be a factor in rousing this mental pain, but I would I had never been born. Must be the cry of Judas, not because of the hellfire around him, but because he loathes the man that betrayed his friend, the world's friend. When a man loathes himself, he has begun to be saved. Punishment tends to this result, not for its own sake, not as a make up for sin, not for divine revenge, horrible word, not for any satisfaction to justice, can punishment exist. Punishment is for the sake of amendment and atonement. God is bound by his love to punish sin in order to deliver his creature. He is bound by his justice to destroy sin in his creation. Love is justice, is the fulfilling of the law for God as well as for his children. This is the reason of punishment. This is why justice requires that the wicked shall not go unpunished, that they, through the eye-opening power of pain, may come to see and do justice, may be brought to desire and make all possible amends and so become just. Such punishment concerns justice in the deepest degree. For justice, that is, God, is bound in himself to see justice done by his children, not in the mere outward act, but in their very being. He is bound in himself to make up for wrong done by his children, and he can do nothing to make up for wrong done, but by bringing about the repentance of the wrong doer. When the man says, I did wrong, I hate myself and my deed, I cannot endure to think that I did it. Then I say, his atonement begun. Without that, all that the Lord did would be lost. He would have made no atonement. Repentance, restitution, confession, prayer for forgiveness, righteous dealing thereafter is the sole possible, the only true make up for sin. For nothing less than this did Christ die. When the man acknowledges the right he denied before, when he says to the wrong, I abjure, I loathe you, I see now what you are, I could not see it before because I would not. God forgive me, make me clean or let me die. Then justice, that is, God, has conquered and not till then. What atonement is there? Every atonement that God cares for. And the work of Jesus Christ on earth was the creative atonement because it works atonement in every heart. He brings and is bringing God and man and man and man into perfect unity. I am them and thou and me that they may be made perfect in one. That is dangerous doctrine. More dangerous than you think to many things. To every evil, to every lie, and among the rest, to every false trust in what Christ did instead of in Christ himself. Paul glories in the cross of Christ, but he does not trust in the cross. He trusts in the living Christ and his living Father. Justice then requires that sin should be put an end to, and not that only, but that it should be atoned for. And where punishment can do anything to this end, where it can help the sinner to know what he has been guilty of, where it can soften his heart to see his pride and wrong and cruelty, justice requires that punishment shall not be spared. And the more we believe in God, the sureer we shall be that he will spare nothing that suffering can do to deliver his child from death. If suffering cannot serve this end, we need look for no more hell but for the destruction of sin by the destruction of the sinner. That, however, would, it appears to me, be for God to suffer defeat, blameless indeed, but defeat. If God be defeated, he must destroy. That is, he must withdraw life. How can he go on sending forth his life into irreclaimable souls to keep sin alive in them throughout the ages of eternity? But then I say no atonement would be made for the wrongs they have done. God remains defeated, for he has created that which sinned and which would not repent and make up for its sin. But those who believe that God will thus be defeated by many souls will surely be of those who do not believe he cares enough to do his very best for them. He is their father. He had power to make them out of himself, separate from himself, and capable of being one with him. Surely he will somehow save and keep them. But the power of sin itself can close all the channels between creating and created. The notion of suffering as an offset for sin, the foolish idea that a man by suffering born may get out from under the hostile claim to which his wrongdoing has subjected him, comes first of all, I think, from the satisfaction we feel when wrong comes to grief. Why do we feel this satisfaction? Because we hate wrong, but not being righteous ourselves, more or less hate the wronger as well as his wrong. Hence are not only righteously pleased to behold the law's disapproval proclaimed in his punishment, but unrighteously pleased with his suffering because of the impact upon us of his wrong. In this way the inborn justice of our nature passes over to evil. It is no pleasure to God, as it so often is to us, to see the wicked suffer. To regard any suffering with satisfaction, save it be sympathetically with its curative quality, comes of evil, is inhuman because undivine, is a thing God is incapable of. His nature is always to forgive, and just because he forgives, he punishes. Because God is so altogether alien to wrong, because it is to him a heart pain and trouble that one of his little ones should do the evil thing. There is, I believe, no extreme of suffering to which, for the sake of destroying the evil thing in them, he would not subject them. A man might flatter or bribe or coax a tyrant, but there is no refuge from the love of God. That love will, for very love, insist upon the uttermost farthing. That is not the sort of love I care about. No, how should you? I will believe it. You cannot care for it until you begin to know it, but the eternal love will not be moved to yield you to the selfishness that is killing you. What lover would yield his lady to her passion for Morphea? You may sneer at such love, but the Son of God who took the weight of that love and bore it through the world is content with it, and so is everyone who knows it. The love of the Father is a radiant perfection. And not self-love is Lord of the universe. Justice demands your punishment because justice demands and will have the destruction of sin. Justice demands your punishment because it demands that your Father should do his best for you. God, being the God of justice, that is, of fair play, and having made us what we are, apt to fall and capable of being raised again, is in himself bound to punish in order to deliver us, else is his relation to us poor beside that of an earthly Father. To thee, O Lord, belongeth mercy, for thou renderest to every man according to his work. A man's work is his character, and God in his mercy is not indifferent, but treats him according to his work. The notion that the salvation of Jesus is a salvation from the consequences of our sins is a false, mean, low notion. The salvation of Christ is salvation from the smallest tendency or leaning to sin. It is a deliverance into the pure air of God's ways of thinking and feeling. It is a salvation that makes the heart pure with the will and choice of the heart to be pure. To such a heart sin is disgusting. It sees a thing as it is, that is, as God sees it, for God sees everything as it is. The soul thus saved would rather sink into the flames of hell than steel into heaven and skulk there under the shadow of an imputed righteousness. No soul is saved that would not prefer hell to sin. Jesus did not die to save us from punishment. He was called Jesus because he should save his people from their sins. If punishment be no atonement, how does the fact bear on the popular theology accepted by every one of the opposers of what they call Christianity as representing its doctrines? Most of us have been more or less trained in it, and not a few of us have thereby, thank God, learned what it is, an evil thing to be cast out of intellect and heart. Many imagine it dead and gone, but in reality it lies at the root, the intellectual root only, thank God, of much of the greater part of the teaching of Christianity in the country, and is believed in so far as the false can be believed in by many who think they have left it behind when they have merely omitted to the truest, most offensive modes of expressing its doctrines. It is humiliating to find how many comparatively honest people think they get rid of a falsehood by softening the statement of it, by giving it the shape and placing it in the light in which it will least assert itself, and so have a good chance of passing both with such as hold it thoroughly and such as might revolt against it more plainly uttered. Once for all I will ease my soul regarding the horrid phantasm. I have passed through no change of opinion concerning it since first I began to write or speak, but I have written little and spoken less about it, because I would preach no mere negation. My work was not to destroy the false, except as it came in the way of building the true. Therefore I sought to speak but what I believed, saying little concerning what I did not believe, trusting as now I trust in the true to cast out the false and shunning dispute. Neither will I now enter any theological list to be the champion for or against mere doctrine. I have no desire to change the opinion of man or woman. Let everyone for me hold what he pleases. But I would do my utmost to disable such as think correct opinion essential to salvation from laying any other burden on the shoulders of true men and women than the yoke of their master. And such burden, if already oppressing any, I would gladly lift. Let the Lord himself teach them I say. A man who has not the mind of Christ and no man has the mind of Christ except him who makes it his business to obey him, cannot have correct opinions concerning him. Neither, if he could, would they be of any value to him. He would be nothing the better. He would be the worse for having them. Our business is not to think correctly, but to live truly. Then first will there be a possibility of our thinking correctly. One chief cause of the amount of unbelief in the world is that those who have seen something of the glory of Christ set themselves to theorize concerning him rather than to obey him. In teaching men, they have not taught them Christ but taught them about Christ. More eager after credible theory than after doing the truth, they have speculated in a condition of heart in which it was impossible they should understand. They have presumed to explain a Christ whom years and years of obedience could alone have made them able to comprehend. Their teaching of him, therefore, has been repugnant to the common sense of many who had not half their privileges but in whom, as in Nathaniel, there was no guile. Such naturally pressed their theories, in general derived from them of old time, upon others, insisting on their thinking about Christ as they think instead of urging them to go to Christ and to be taught by him whatever he chooses to teach them. They do their unintentional worst to stop all growth, all life. From such and their false teaching I would gladly help to deliver the true hearted. Let the dead bury their dead, but I would do what I may to keep them from burying the living. If there be no satisfaction to justice in the mere punishment of the wrongdoer, what shall we say of the notion of satisfying justice by causing one to suffer who is not the wrongdoer? And what, moreover, shall we say to the notion that just because he is not the person who deserves to be punished but is absolutely innocent, his suffering gives perfect satisfaction to the perfect justice? That the injustice be done with the consent of the person maltreated makes no difference. It makes it even worse, seeing as they say that justice requires the punishment of the sinner and here is one far more than innocent. They have shifted their ground. It is no more punishment, but mere suffering the law requires. The thing gets worse and worse. I declare my utter and absolute repudiation of the idea in any form whatever. Rather than believe in a justice, that is a God, to whose righteousness abstract or concrete, it could be any satisfaction for the wrongdoing of a man that a man who did no wrong should suffer. I would be driven from among men and dwell with the wild beast that have not reason enough to be unreasonable. What, God the father of Jesus Christ like that? His justice contented with direst injustice? The anger of him who will no wise clear the guilty appeased by the suffering of the innocent? Very God forbid! Observe, the evil fancy actually substitutes for punishment not mere suffering, but that suffering which is farthest from punishment and this when, as I have shown, punishment the severest can be no satisfaction to justice. How did it come ever to be imagined? It sprang from the trustless dread that cannot believe in the forgiveness of the father, cannot believe that even God will do anything for nothing, cannot trust him without a legal arrangement to bind him. How many failing to trust God fall back on a text as they call it? It sprang from the pride that will understand what it cannot before it will obey what it sees. He that will understand first will believe a lie, a lie from which obedience alone will at length deliver him. If anyone say, but I believe what you despise, I answer, to believe it is your punishment for being able to believe it. You may call it your reward, if you will. You ought not to be able to believe it. It is the merest, poorest, most shameless fiction invented without the perception that it was an invention fit to satisfy the intellect doubtless of the inventor, else he could not have invented it. It has seemed to satisfy also many a humble soul, content to take what was given and not think, content that another should think for him and tell him what was the mind of his father in heaven. Again I say, let the person who can be so satisfied be so satisfied. I have not to trouble myself with him, that he can be content with it argues him unready to receive better. So long as he can believe false things concerning God, he is such as is capable of believing them, with how much or how little of blame God knows. Opinion, right or wrong, will do nothing to save him. I would that he thought no more about this or any other opinion, but set himself to do the work of the master. With his opinions, true or false, I have nothing to do. It is because such as he forced evil things upon their fellows, utter or imply them from the seat of authority or influence, to their agony, their paralyzation, their unbelief, their indignation, their stumbling, that I have any right to speak. I would save my fellows from having what notion of God is possible to them blotted out by a lie. If it be asked how, if it be false, the doctrine of substitution can have been permitted to remain so long an article of faith to so many. I answer, on the same principle on which God took up and made use of the sacrifices men had in their lack of faith, invented as a way of pleasing him. Some children will tell lies to please the parents that hate lying. They will even confess to having done a wrong they have not done, thinking their parents would like them to say they had done it because they teach them to confess. God accepted men's sacrifices until he could get them to see, and with how many has he yet not succeeded in the church and out of it, that he does not care for such things. But, again, it may well be asked, whence then has sprung the undeniable potency of that teaching? I answer, from it having in it a notion of God and his Christ, poor indeed and faint, but by the very poverty and untruth in its presentation, fit it to the weakness and unbelief of men, seeing it was by men invented to meet and ease the demand made upon their own weakness and unbelief. Thus the leaven spreads. The truth is there. It is Christ, the glory of God. But the ideas that poor, slavish souls breed concerning this glory the moment the darkness begins to disperse is quite another thing. Truth is indeed too good for men to believe. They must dilute it before they can take it. They must dilute it before they dare give it. They must make it less true before they can believe it enough to get any good of it. Unable to believe in the love of the Lord Jesus Christ, they invented a mediator in his mother, and so were able to approach a little where else they had stood away. Unable to believe in the forgiveness of their father in heaven, they invented a way to be forgiven that should not demand of him so much, which might make it right for him to forgive, which should save them from having to believe downright in the tenderness of his father heart. For that they found impossible. They thought him bound to punish for the sake of punishing as an offset to their sin. They could not believe in clear forgiveness. That did not seem divine. It needed itself to be justified. So they invented for its justification a horrible injustice involving all that was bad in sacrifice, even human sacrifice. They invented a satisfaction for sin, which was an insult to God. He sought to no satisfaction, but an obedient return to the father. What satisfaction was needed, he made himself and what he did to cause them to turn from evil and go back to him. The thing was too simple for complicated unbelief in the arguing spirit. Gladly would I help their followers to loathe such thoughts of God. But for that they themselves must grow better men and women. While they are capable of being satisfied with them, there would be no advantage in their becoming intellectually convinced that such thoughts were wrong. I would not speak a word to persuade them of it. Success would be worthless. They would but remain what they were. Children capable of thinking meanly of their father. When the heart recoils, discovering how horrible it would be to have such an unreality for God, it will begin to search about and see whether it must indeed accept such statements concerning God. It will search after a real God by whom to hold fast, a real God to deliver them from the terrible idol. It is for those thus moved that I write, not at all for the sake of disputing with those who love the lie they may not be to blame for holding, who, like the Jews of old, would cast out of their synagogue the man who doubts the genuineness of their moral caricature of God, who doubts their travesty of the grandest truth in the universe, the atonement of Jesus Christ. Of such a man they will unhesitatingly report that he does not believe in the atonement, but a lie for God is against God and carries the sentence of death in itself. Instead of giving their energy to do the will of God, men of power have given it to the construction of a system by which to explain why Christ must die, what were the necessities and designs of God in permitting his death, and men of power of our own day, while casting from them not a little of the good in the teaching of the Roman church, have clung to the morally and spiritually vulgar idea of justice and satisfaction held by pagan Rome, buttressed by the Jewish notion of sacrifice, and in its very home, alas, with the mother of all the Western churches. Better the reformers had kept their belief in a purgatory and parted with what is called vicarious sacrifice. Their system is briefly this. God is bound to punish sin and to punish it to the uttermost. His justice requires that sin be punished, but he loves man and does not want to punish him if he can help it. Jesus Christ says, I will take his punishment upon me. God accepts his offer and lets man go unpunished upon a condition. His justice is more than satisfied by the punishment of an infinite being instead of a world of worthless creatures. The suffering of Jesus is of greater value than that of all the generations through endless ages because he is infinite, pure, perfect in love and truth, being God's own everlasting son. God's condition with man is this, that he believe in Christ's atonement, thus explained. A man must say, I have sinned and deserved to be tortured to all eternity, but Christ has paid my debts by being punished instead of me. Therefore he is my savior. I am now bound by gratitude to him to turn away from evil. Some would doubtless insist on his saying a good deal more, but this is enough for my purpose. As to the justice of God requiring the punishment of the sinner, I have said enough, that the mere suffering of the sinner can be no satisfaction to justice, I have also tried to show. If the suffering of the sinner be indeed required by the justice of God, let it be administered. But what shall we say adequate to confront the base representation that it is not punishment, not the suffering of the sinner that is required, but suffering? Nay, as if this were not depth enough of baseness to crown all heathenish representation of the ways of God, that the suffering of the innocent is unspeakably preferable in his eyes to that of the wicked as a makeup for wrong done. Nay, again, in the lowest deep, a lower deep, that the suffering of the holy, the suffering of the loving, the suffering of the eternally and perfectly good is supremely satisfactory to the pure justice of the father of spirits. Not all the suffering that could be heaped upon the wicked could buy them a moment's respite so little is their suffering a counter-poise to their wrong. In the working of this law of equivalent, this Lex Talionis, the suffering of millions of years could not equal the sin of a moment, could not pay off one farthing of the deep debt. But so much more valuable, precious and dear is the suffering of the innocent, so much more of a satisfaction observed to the justice of God that in return for that suffering another wrong is done. The sinners who deserve and ought to be punished are set free. I know the root of all that can be said on the subject. The notion is embedded in the gray matter of my Scotch brains. And if I reject it, I know what I reject. For the love of God, my heart rose early against the low invention. Strange that in a Christian land, it should need to be said that to punish the innocent and let the guilty go free is unjust. It wrongs the innocent, the guilty, and God himself. It would be the worst of all wrongs to the guilty to treat them as innocent. The whole device is a piece of spiritual charlatanry fit only for a fraudulent jail delivery. If the wicked ought to be punished, it were the worst possible perversion of justice to take a righteous being however strong and punish him instead of the sinner however weak. To the poorest idea of justice and punishment, it is essential that the sinner and no other than the sinner should receive the punishment. The strong being that was willing to bear such punishment might well be regarded as worshipful. But what of the God who so-called justice he thus defeats? If you say it is justice, not God that demands the suffering, I say justice cannot demand that which is unjust and the whole thing is unjust. God is absolutely just and there is no deliverance from his justice which is one with his mercy. The peace is an absurdity, a grotesquely deformed absurdity. To represent the living God as a party to such a style of action is to veil with a mask of cruelty and hypocrisy the face whose glory can be seen only in the face of Jesus. To put a tirade of vulgar Roman legality into the mouth of the Lord God merciful and gracious who will by no means clear the guilty. Rather than believe such ugly folly of him whose very name is enough to make those that know him heave the breath of the heart panting for the waterbrooks rather than think of him what in a man would make me avoid him at the risk of my life, I would say there is no God. Let us neither eat nor drink that we may die for low. This is not our God. This is not he for whom we have waited. But I have seen his face and heard his voice in the face and the voice of Jesus Christ. And I say this is our God. The very one whose being the creator makes it an infinite gladness to be the created. I will not have the God of the scribes and the Pharisees whether Jewish or Christian Protestant Roman or Greek but my father O Christ, he is my God. If you say that is our God, not yours, I answer. Your portrait of your God is an evil caricature of the face of Christ. To believe in a vicarious sacrifice is to think to take refuge with the son from the righteousness of the father, to take refuge with his work instead of with the son himself. To take refuge with the theory of that work instead of the work itself. To shelter behind a false quirk of law instead of nestling in the eternal heart of the unchangeable and righteous father who is merciful and that he renders to every man according to his work and compels their obedience nor admits judicial quibble or such a huge. God will never let a man off with any fault. He must have him clean. He will excuse him to the very uttermost of truth but not a hair's breadth beyond it. He is his true father and will have his child true as his son Jesus Christ is true. He will impute to him nothing that he has not. Will lose sight of no smallest good that he has. Will quench no smoking flax, break no bruised reed but send forth judgment unto victory. He is God's beyond all that heart hungriest for love and righteousness could to eternity desire. If you say the best of men have held the opinions I stigmatize, I answer some of the best of men have indeed held these theories and of men who have held them I have loved and honored some heartily and humbly but because of what they were not because of what they thought and they were what they were in virtue of their obedient faith not of their opinion. They were not better men because of holding these theories in virtue of knowing God by obeying his son they rose above the theories they had never looked in the face and so had never recognized as evil. Many have arrived in the natural progress of their sacred growth at the point where they must abandon them. The man of whom I knew the most good gave them up gladly. Good to worshipfulness may be the man that holds them and I hate them the more therefore they are lies that working undercover of the truth mingled with them burrow as near the heart of the good man as they can go. Whoever from whatever reason of blindness may be the holder of a lie the thing is a lie and no falsehood must mingle with the justice we meet out to it. There is nothing for any lie but the pit of hell. Yet until the man see the thing to be a lie how shall he but hold it? Are there not mingled with it shadows of the best truth in the universe? So long as a man is able to love a lie he is incapable of seeing it as a lie. He who is true out and out will know it once and untruth and to that vision we must all come. I do not write for the sake of those who either make or heartily accept any lie. When they see the glory of God they will see the eternal difference between the false and the true and not till then. I write for those whom such teaching as theirs has folded in a cloud through which they cannot see the stars of heaven so that some of them even doubt if there be any stars of heaven. For the holy ones who believed and taught these things in days gone by all as well. Many of the holiest of them cast the lies from them long ere the present teachers of them were born. Many who would never have invented them for themselves yet receiving them with the seals affixed of so many good men took them in their humility as recognized truths instead of inventions of men and oppressed by authority the authority of men far inferior to themselves did not dare dispute them but proceeded to order their lives by what truths they found in their company and so had the reward the reward of obedience and being by that obedience brought to know God which knowledge broke for them the net of presumptuous self-styled orthodoxing. Every man who tries to obey the master is my brother whether he counts me such or not and I revere him but dare I give quarter to what I see to be a lie because my brother believes it. The lie is not of God whoever may hold it. Well then many will say if you thus unceremoniously cast to the winds the doctrine of vicarious sacrifice what theory do you propose to substitute in its stead? In the name of the truth I answer none. I will send out no theory of mine to rouse a fresh little whirlwinds of dialogistic dust mixed with dirt and straws and holy words hiding the master and talk about him. If I have any such I will not cast it on the road as I walk but present it on a fair patine to him to whom I may thank it well to show it. Only eyes opened by the son of righteousness and made single by obedience can judge even the poor moony pearl of formulated thought. Say if you will that I fear to show my opinion. Is the man a coward who will not fling his child to the wolves? What faith in this kind I have I will have to myself before God till I see better reason for uttering it than I do now. Will you then take from me my faith and help me to know other? Your faith? God forbid. Your theory is not your faith nor anything like it. Your faith is your obedience. Your theory? I know not what. Yes, I will gladly leave you without any of what you call faith. Trust in God. Obey the word every word of the master. That is faith. And so believing your opinion will grow out of your true life and be worthy of it. Peter says the Lord gives the spirit to him that obey him, the spirit of the master and that alone can guide you to any theory that it will be of any use to you to hold. A theory arrived at any other way is not worth the time spent on it. Jesus is the creating and saving Lord of our intellects as well as of our more precious hearts. Nothing that he does not think is worth thinking. No man can think as he thinks except he be pure like him. No man can be pure like him except he go with him and learn from him. To put off obeying him till we find a credible theory concerning him is to set aside the potion we know at our duty to drink for the study of the various schools of therapy. You know what Christ requires of you is right. Much of it at least you believe to be right and your duty to do. Whether he said it or not, do it. If you do not do what you know of the truth I do not wonder that you seek it intellectually for that kind of search may well be as Milton represents it a solace even to the fallen angels but do not call anything that may be so gained the truth. How can you not caring to be true judge concerning him whose life was to do for very love the things you confess your duty yet to do them not. Obey the truth I say and let theory wait. Theory may spring from life but never life from theory. I will not then tell you what I think but I will tell any man who cares to hear it what I believe. I will do it now. Of course what I say must partake thus much of the character of theory that I cannot prove it. I can only endeavor to order my life by it. I believe in Jesus Christ the eternal son of God my elder brother my lord and master. I believe that he has a right to my absolute obedience where in so ever I know or shall come to know his will that to obey him is to ascend the pinnacle of my being that not to obey him would be to deny him. I believe that he died that I might die like him die to any ruling power in me but the will of God live ready to be nailed to the cross as he was if God will it. I believe that he is my savior from myself and from all that has come of loving myself from all that God does not love and would not have me love all that is not worth loving that he died that the justice the mercy of God might have its way with me making me just as God is just merciful as he is merciful perfect as my father in heaven is perfect I believe and pray that he will give me what punishment I need to set me right or keep me from going wrong I believe that he died to deliver me from all meanness all pretense all falseness all unfairness all poverty of spirit all cowardice all fear all anxiety all forms of self love all trust or hope and possession to make me marry as a child the child of our father in heaven loving nothing but what is lovely desiring nothing I should be ashamed to let the universe of God see me desire I believe that God is just like Jesus only greater yet for Jesus said so I believe that God is absolutely grandly beautiful even as the highest soul of man counts beauty but infinitely beyond that soul's highest idea with the beauty that creates beauty not merely shows it where itself exists beautiful I believe that God has always done is always doing his best for every man that no man is miserable because God is forgetting him that he is not a God to crouch before but our father to whom the child heart cries exultant do with me as thou wilt I believe that there is nothing good for me or for any man but God and more and more of God and that alone through knowing Christ can we come nigh to him I believe that no man is ever condemned for any sin except one that he will not leave his sins and come out of them and be the child of him who is his father I believe that justice and mercy are simply one and the same thing without justice to the full there can be no mercy and without mercy to the full there can be no justice that such is the mercy of God that he will hold his children in the consuming fire of his distance until they pay the utter most farthing until they drop the purse of selfishness with all the dross that is in it and rush home to the father and the son and the mini brethren rush inside the center of the life giving fire whose outer circles burn I believe that no hell will be lacking which would help the just mercy of God to redeem his children I believe that to him who obeys and thus opens the doors of his heart to receive the eternal gift God gives the spirit of his son the spirit of himself to be in him and lead him to the understanding of all truth that the true disciples shall thus always know what he ought to do though not necessarily what another ought to do that the spirit of the father and the son enlightens by teaching righteousness I believe that no teacher should strive to make men think as he thinks but to lead them to the living truth to the master himself of whom alone they can learn anything who will make them in themselves know what is true by the very seeing of it I believe that the inspiration of the Almighty alone gives understanding I believe that to be the disciple of Christ is the end of being that to persuade men to be his disciples is the end of teaching the sum of all this is that you do not believe in the atonement I believe in Jesus Christ nowhere am I requested to believe in anything or in any statement but everywhere to believe in God and in Jesus Christ in what you call the atonement and what you mean by the word what I have already written must make it plain enough I do not believe God forbid I should for it would be to believe a lie and a lie which is to blame for much non-acceptance of the gospel in this and other lands but as the word was used by the best english writers at the time when the translation of the bible was made with all my heart and soul and strength in mind I believe in the atonement call it the atonement or the atonement as you please I believe that Jesus Christ is our atonement that through him we are reconciled to made one with God there is not one word in the new testament about reconciling God to us it is we that have to be reconciled to God I am not writing neither desire to write a treaties on the atonement my business being to persuade men to be atoned to God but I will go so far to meet my questioner as to say without the slightest expectation of satisfying him or the least care whether I do so or not for his opinion is of no value to me though his truth is of endless value to me and to the universe that even in the sense of the atonement being a making up for the evil done by men toward God I believe in the atonement did not the Lord cast himself into the eternal gulf of evil yawning between the children and the father did he not bring the father to us let us look on our eternal sire in the face of his true son that we might have that in our hearts which alone could make us love him a true sight of him did he not insist on the one truth of the universe the one saving truth that God was just what he was did he not hold to that assertion to the last in the face of contradiction and death did he not thus lay down his life persuading us to lay down ours at the feet of the father has not his very life by which he died passed into those who have received him and recreated theirs so that now they live with the life which alone is life did he not foil and slay evil by letting all the waves and bellows of its hoard see break upon him go over him and die without rebound spin their rage fall defeat it and cease verily he made atonement we sacrifice to God it is God who has sacrificed his own son to us there was no way else of getting the gift of himself into our hearts Jesus sacrificed himself to his father and the children to bring them together all the love on the side of the father and the son all the selfishness on the side of the children if the joy that alone makes life worth living the joy that God is such as Christ be a true thing in my heart how can I but believe in the atonement of Jesus Christ I believe it heartily as God means it then again as the power that brings about to making up for any wrong done by man to man I believe in the atonement who that believes in Jesus does not long to atone to his brother for the injury he has done him what repentant child feeling he has wronged his father does not desire to make atonement who is the mover the causer the persuader the creator of the repentance of the passion that restores fourfold Jesus our propitiation our atonement he is the head and leader the prince of the atonement he could not do it without us but he leads us up to the father's knee he makes us make atonement learning Christ we are not only sorry for what we have done wrong we not only turn from it and hate it but we become able to serve both God and man with an infinitely high and true service a soul service we are able to offer our whole being to God to whom by deepest right it belongs have I injured anyone with him to aid my justice new risen with him from the dead shall I not make good amends have I felled in love to my neighbor shall I not now love him with an infinitely better love than was possible to me before that I will and can make atonement thanks be to him who is my atonement making me at one with God and my fellows he is my life my joy my lord my owner the perfecter of my being by the perfection of his own I dare not say with Paul that I am the slave of Christ but my highest aspiration and desire is to be the slave of Christ but you do not believe that the sufferings of Christ as sufferings justified the supreme ruler in doing anything which he would not have been at liberty to do but for those sufferings I do not I believe the notion as unworthy of man's belief as it is dishonoring to God it has its origin doubtless and a salutary sense of sin but sense of sin is not inspiration though it may lie not far from the temple door it is indeed an opener of the eyes but upon home defilement not upon heavenly truth it is not the revealer of secrets also there is another factor in the theory and that is unbelief in capacity to accept the freedom of God's forgiveness in capacity to believe that it is God's chosen nature to forgive that he is bound in his own divinely willed nature to forgive no atonement is necessary to him but that men should leave their sins and come back to his heart but men cannot believe in the forgiveness of God therefore they need therefore he has given them a mediator and yet they will not know him they think of the father of souls as if he had abdicated his fatherhood for their sins and assumed the judge if he put off his fatherhood which he cannot do for it is an eternal fact he puts off with it all relation to it he cannot repudiate the essential and keep the resultant man cannot or will not or dare not see that nothing but his being our father gives him any right over us that nothing but that could give him a perfect right they regard the father of their spirits as their governor they yield the idea of the ancient of days the glad creator and put in its stead a miserable puritanical martinette of a god caring not for righteousness but for his rights not for the eternal purities but to the goodie properties the prophets of such a god take all the glow all the hope all the color all the worth out of life on earth and offer you instead what they call eternal bliss appell tearless hell of all things turn from a mean poverty stricken faith but if you are straightened in your own mammon worshiping soul how shall you believe in a god any greater than can stand up in that prison chamber a desire to wake no dispute will myself dispute with no man but for the sake of those whom certain believers trouble i have spoken my mind i love the one god seen in the face of jesus christ from all copies of jonathan edwards portrait of god however faded by time however softened by the use of less glaring pigments i turn with loathing not such a god is he concerning whom was the message john heard from jesus that he is light and in him is no darkness at all end of chapter seven series three chapter eight of unspoken sermons series three this liber vox recording is in the public domain recording by david baltwin unspoken sermons by george mcdonald light this then is the message which we have heard of him and declare into you that god is light and in him is no darkness at all first john chapter one verse five and this is the condemnation that light is come into the world and men loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil john chapter three verse nineteen we call the story of jesus told so differently yet to my mind so consistently by four narrators the gospel what makes this tell the good news is everything in the story of christ life on earth good news is it good news that the one only good man was served by his fellow men as jesus was served cast out of the world in torture and shame is it good news that he came to his own and his own received him not what makes it fit i repeat to call the tell good news if we ask this or that theologian we should in so far as he was a true man and answered from his own heart and not from the tradition of the elders understand what he saw in it to make it good news to him though it might involve what would be anything but good news to some of us the deliverance it might seem to this or that man to bring might be founded on such notions of god as to not a few of us contain as little of good as of news to share in the deliverance which some men find in what they call the gospel for all do not apply the word to the tell itself but to certain deductions made from the epistles and their own consciousness of evil we should have to believe such things of god as would be the opposite of an evangel to us yay a message from hell itself we should have to imagine that whose possibility would be worse than any ill from which their good news might offer us deliverance we must first believe in an unjust god from whom we have to seek refuge true they call him just but say he does that which seems to the best in me the essence of injustice they will tell me i judge after the flesh i answer is it then to the flesh the lord appeals when he says yay and why even of yourselves judge ye not what is right is he not the light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world they tell me i was born in sin and i knew it to be true they tell me also that i am judged with the same severity as if i had been born in righteousness and that i know to be false they make it a consequence of the purity and justice of god that he will judge us born in evil for which birth we were not accountable by our sinfulness instead of by our guilt they tell me or at least give me to understand that every wrong thing i have done makes me subject to be treated as if i had done that thing with the free will of one who had in him no taint of evil when perhaps i did not at the time recognize the thing is evil or recognize that only in the vaguest fashion is there any gospel and telling me that god is unjust but that there is a way of deliverance from him show me my god unjust and you awaken me a damnation from which no power can deliver me least of all god himself it may be good news too such as our content to have a god capable of unrighteousness if only he be on their side who would not rejoice to hear from matthew or mark or luke what in a few words he meant by the word gospel or rather what in the story of jesus made him call it good news each would probably give a different answer to the question all the answers consistent and each a germ from which the other might be reasoned but in the case of john we have his answer to the question he gives us in one sentence of two members not indeed the gospel according to john but the gospel according to jesus christ himself he had often told the story of jesus the good news of what he was and did and said what in it all did john look upon as the essence of the goodness of its news in his gospel he gives us all about him the message concerning him now he tells us what in it makes it to himself and to us good news tells us the very goodness of the good news it is not now his own message about jesus but the soul of that message that which makes it gospel the news jesus brought concerning the father and gave the disciples as his message to them to deliver to men throughout the story jesus and all he does and is and says is telling the news concerning his father which he was sent to give to john and his companions that they might hand it on to their brothers but here in so many words john tells us what he himself has heard from the word what in some he has gathered from jesus as the message he has to declare he has received it in no systematic form it is what a life the life what a man the man has taught him the word is the lord the lord is the gospel the good news is no faggots of sticks of a man's gathering on the Sabbath every man must read the word for himself one may read it in one shape another and another all will be right if it be indeed the word they read and they read it by the lamp of obedience he who is willing to do the will of the father shall know the truth of the teaching of jesus the spirit is given to them that obey him but let us hear how john reads the word hear what is john's version of the gospel this then is the message he says which we have heard of him and declare unto you that god is light and in him is no darkness at all oh my heart this is indeed the good news for thee this is a gospel if god be light what more what else can i seek than god than god himself away with your doctrines away with your salvation from the justice of a god whom it is a horror to imagine away with your iron cages of false metaphysics i am saved for god is light my god i come to thee that thou should be thyself is enough for time and eternity for my soul and all its endless need whatever seems to me darkness that i will not believe of my god if i should mistake and call that darkness which is light will he not reveal the matter to me setting it in the light that lighteth every man showing me that i saw but the husk of the thing not the kernel will he not break open the shell for me and let the truth of it his thought stream out upon me he will not let it hurt me to mistake the light for darkness while i take not the darkness for light the one comes from the blindness of the intellect the other from the blindness of heart and will i love the light and will not believe at the word of any man or upon the conviction of any man that that which seems to me darkness is in god where would the good news be if john said god is light but you cannot see his light you cannot tell you have no notion what light is what god means by light is not what you mean by light what god calls light may be horrible darkness to you for you are of another nature from him where i say would be the good news of that it is true the light of god may be so bright that we see nothing but that is not darkness it is infinite hope of light it is true also that to the wicket the day of the lord is darkness and not light but is that because the conscience of the wicket man judges of good and evil oppositely to the conscience of the good man when he says evil be thou my good he means by evil what god means by evil and by good he means pleasure he cannot make the meanings change places to say what our deepest conscience calls darkness may be light to god is blasphemy to say light and god and light and man or of differing kinds is to speak against the spirit of light god is light far beyond what we can see but what we mean by light god means by light and what is like to god is like to us or would be like to us if we saw it and will be like to us when we do see it god means us to be jubilant in the fact that he is light that he is what his children made in his image mean when they say light that what in him is dark to them is dark by excellent glory by too much cause of jubilation that however dark it may be to their eyes it is light even as they mean it light for their eyes and souls and hearts to take in the moment they are enough of eyes enough of souls enough of hearts to receive it in its very being living light thou wilt not have me believe anything dark of thee thou wilt have me so sure of thee as to dare to say that is not of god which i see dark see unlike the master if i am not honest enough if the eye in me be not single enough to see thy light thou wilt punish me i thank thee and purge my eyes from their darkness that they may let the light in and so i become an inheritor with thy other children of that light which is thy godhead and makes thy creatures need to worship thee in thy light we shall see light all men will not in our present imperfection see the same light but light is light notwithstanding and what each does see is his safety if he obeys it in proportion as we have the image of christ mirrored in us we shall know what is and is not light but never will anything prove to be light that is not of the same kind with that which we mean by light with that in a thing which makes us call it light the darkness yet left in us makes us sometimes doubt of a thing whether it be light or darkness but when the eye is single the whole body will be full of light to fear the light is to be untrue or at least comes of untruth no being for himself or for another needs fear the light of god nothing can be in light inimical to our nature which is of god or to anything in us that is worthy all fear of the light all dread lest there should be something dangerous in it comes of the darkness still in those of us who do not love the truth with all our hearts it will vanish as we are more and more interpenetrated with the light in a word there is no way of thought or action which we count admirable in man in which god is not altogether adorable there is no loveliness nothing that makes man dear to his brother man that is not in god only it is infinitely better in god he is god our savior jesus is our savior because god is our savior he is the god of comfort and consolation he will soothe and satisfy his children better than any mother her infant the only thing he will not give them is leave to stay in the dark if a child cry i want the darkness and complain that he will not give it yet he will not give it he gives what his child needs often by refusing what he asks if his child say i will not be good i prefer to die let me die his dealing with the child will be as if he said no i have the right to content you not giving you your own will but mine which is your one good you shall not die you shall live to thank me that i would not hear your prayer you know what you ask but not what you refuse there are good things god must delay giving until his child has a pocket to hold them till he gets his child to make that pocket he must first make him fit to receive and to have there is no part of our nature that shall not be satisfied and that's not by lessening it but by enlarging it to embrace and ever enlarging enough come to god then my brother my sister with all thy desires and instincts all thy lofty ideals all thy longing for purity and unselfishness all thy yearning to love and be true all thy aspiration after self-forgetfulness and child life in the breath of the father come to him with all thy weaknesses all thy shames all thy futilities with all thy helplessness over thy own thoughts with all thy failure yay with the sixth sense of having missed the tide of true affairs come to him with all thy doubts fears dishonesties meannesses paltrynesses misjudgments wearinesses disappointments and stillnesses be sure he will take thee and all thy miserable brood whether of draggling angels or covert seeking snakes into his care the angels for life the snakes for death and thee for liberty in his limitless heart for he is light and in him is no darkness at all if he were a king a governor if the name that described him were the almighty thou mightst well doubt whether there could be light enough in him for thee and thy darkness but he is thy father and more thy father than the word can mean in any lips but his who said my father and your father my god and your god and such a father is light an infinite perfect light if he were any less or any other than he is and thou couldst yet go on growing thou must at length come to the point where thou wouldst be dissatisfied with him but he is light and in him is no darkness at all if anything seemed to be in him that you cannot be content with be sure that the ripening of thy love to thy fellows and to him the source of thy being will make thee at length know that anything else than just what he is would have been to thee an endless loss be not afraid to build upon the rock christ as if thy holy imagination might build too high and heavy for that rock and it must give way and crumble beneath the way to thy divine idea let no one persuade thee that there is in him a little darkness because of something he has said which his creature interprets into darkness the interpretation is the work of the enemy a handful of tears of darkness sown in the light neither let thy cowardly conscious receive any word as light because another calls it light while it looks to thee dark say either the thing is not what it seems or god never said or did it but of all evils to misinterpret what god does and then say the thing as interpret it must be right because god does it is of the devil do not try to believe anything that affects thee as darkness even if thou mistake and refuse something true thereby thou wilt do less wrong to christ by such a refusal than thou wouldst by accepting as his what thou canst only see as darkness it is impossible thou art seeing a true a real thing seeing it as it is i mean if it look to the darkness but let thy words be few lest thou say with thy tongue what thou wilt afterward repent with thy heart above all things believe in the light that it is what thou callest light though the darkness in thee may give the cause at a time to doubt whether thou art verily seeing the light but there is another side to the matter god is light indeed but there is darkness darkness is death and men are in it yes darkness is death but not death to him that comes out of it it may sound paradoxical but no man is condemned for anything he has done he is condemned for continuing to do wrong he is condemned for not coming out of the darkness for not coming to the light the living god who sent the light his son into the world to guide him home let us hear what john says about the darkness for here also we have i think the word of the apostle himself at the 13th verse he begins i think to speak in his own person in the 19th verse he says and this is the condemnation not that men are sinners not that they have done that which even at the moment they were ashamed of not that they have committed murder not that they have betrayed man or woman not that they have ground the faces of the poor making money by the groans of their fellows not for any hideous thing or they condemned but that they will not leave such doings behind and do them no more this is the condemnation that light is coming to the world and men would not come out of the darkness to the light but loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil choosing evil clinging to evil loving the darkness because it suits with their deeds therefore turning their backs on the end breaking light how can they but be condemned if god be true if he be light and darkness be alien to him whatever of honesty is in man whatever of judgment is left in the world must allow that their condemnation is in the very nature of things that it must rest on them and abide but if one happens to utter some individual truth which another man has made into one of the cogs of his system he is in danger of being supposed to accept all the toothed wills and their relations in that system i therefore go on to say that it does not follow because light has come into the world that it has fallen upon this or that man he has his portion of the light that lighteth every man but the revelation of god in christ may not yet have reached him a man might see and pass the lord in a crowd nor be to blame like the jews of jerusalem for not knowing him a man like nathaniel might have started and stopped at the nearest glimpse of him but all growing men are not yet like him without guile everyone who has not yet come to the light is not necessarily keeping his face turned away from it we dare not say that this or that man would not have come to the light had he seen it we do not know that he will not come to the light the moment he does see it god gives every man time there is a light that lightens sage and savage but the glory of god in the face of jesus may not have shined on this sage or that savage the condemnation is of those who having seen jesus refuse to come to him or pretend to come to him but do not the things he says they have all sorts of excuses at hand but as soon as a man begins to make excuse the time has come when he might be doing that from which he excuses himself how many are there not who believing there is something somewhere with the claim of light upon them go on and on to get more out of the darkness this consciousness all neglected by them gives broad ground for the expostulation of the lord ye will not come into me that ye might have a light all manner of sin and blasphemy the lord said shall be forgiven unto men but the blasphemy against the spirit shall not be forgiven god speaks as it were in this manner i forgive you everything not to word more shall be said about your sins only come out of them come out of the darkness of your exile come into the light of your home of your birthright and do evil no more lie no more cheat no more oppress no more slander no more envy no more be neither greedy nor vain love your neighbor as i love you be my good child trust in your father i am light come to me and you shall see things as i see them and hate the evil thing i will make you love the thing which now you call good and love not i forgive all the past i thank the lord for forgiving me but i prefer staying in the darkness forgive me that too no that cannot be the one thing that cannot be forgiven is the sin of choosing to be evil of refusing deliverance it is impossible to forgive that sin it would be to take part in it decide with wrong against right with murder against life cannot be forgiven the thing that is past i pass but he who goes on doing the same annihilates this my forgiveness making it of no effect let a man have committed any sin whatever i forgive him but to choose to go on sinning how can i forgive that it would be to nourish and cherish evil it would be to let my creation go to ruin shall i keep you alive to do things hateful in the sight of all true men if a man refused to come out of his sin he must suffer the vengeance of a love that would be no love if it left him there shall i allow my creature to be the one thing my soul hates there is no excuse for this refusal if we were punished for every fault there would be no end no respite we should have no quiet we're into repent but god passes by all he can he passes by and forgets a thousand sins yay tens of thousands forgiving them all only we must begin to be good begin to do evil no more he who refuses must be punished and punished punished through all the ages punished until he gives way yields and comes to the light that his deeds may be seen by himself to be what they are and be by himself reproved and the father at last will have his child again for the man who in this world resists to the full there may be perhaps a whole age or era in the history of the universe during which his sin shall not be forgiven but never can it be forgiven until he repents how can they who will not repent be forgiven save in the sense that god does and will do all he can to make them repent who knows but such sin may need for its cure the continuous punishment of an eon there are three conceivable kinds of punishment first that of mere retribution which i take to be entirely an only human therefore indeed more properly inhuman for that which is not divine is not essential to humanity and is of evil and an intrusion upon the human second that which works repentance and third that which refines and purifies working for holiness but the punishment that falls on whom the lord loveth because they have repented is a very different thing from the punishment that falls on those whom he loveth indeed but cannot forgive because they hold fast by their sins there are also various ways in which the word forgive can be used a man might say to his son my boy i forgive you you did not know what you were doing i will say no more about it or he might say my boy i forgive you but i must punish you for you have done the same thing several times and i must make you remember or again he might say i am seriously angry with you i cannot forgive you i must punish you severely the thing was too shameful i cannot pass it by or once more he might say except you alter your ways entirely i shall have nothing more to do with you you need not come to me i will not take the responsibility of anything you do so far from answering for you i shall feel bound in honesty to warn my friends not to put confidence in you never never till i see a greater difference in you than i dare hope to see in this world will i forgive you i can no more regard you as one of the family i shall die to save you but i cannot forgive you there is nothing in you now on which to rest forgiveness to say i forgive you would be to say do anything you like i do not care what you do so god may forgive and punish and he may punish and not forgive that he may rescue to forgive the sin against the holy spirit would be to damn the universe to the pit of lies to render it impossible for the man so forgiven ever to be saved he cannot forgive the man who will not come to the light because his deeds are evil against that man his fatherly heart is moved with indignation end of chapter eight series three