from an arresting of the
consequences of sin. When God forgives a sin, it does not follow that
He stops its consequences: for example, when He forgives the
intemperate man whose health is ruined, forgiveness does not restore
his health. Divine pardon does not interfere with the laws of the
universe, for it is itself one of those laws. It is a law that penalty
follows transgression. Forgiveness will not save from penalty; but it
alters the feelings with which the penalty is accepted. Pain inflicted
with a surgeon's knife for a man's good, is as keen as that which
results from the knife of the torturer; but in the one case it is
calmly borne, because remedial--in the other it exasperates, because
it is felt to be intended by malevolence. So with the difference
between suffering which comes from a sin which we hope God has
forgiven, and suffering which seems to fall hot from the hand of an
angry God. It is a fearful truth, that so far as we know at least, the
consequences of an act are connected with it indissolubly. Forgiveness
does not arrest them; but by producing softness and grateful
penitence, it transforms them into blessings. This is God's
forgiveness; and absolution is the conveyance to the conscience of the
conviction of forgiveness: to absolve is to free--to comfort by
strengthening--to afford repose from fear.

Now it was the way of the Redeemer to emancipate from sin by the
freeness of absolution. The dying thief, an hour before a blasphemer,
was unconditionally assured; the moment the sinner's feelings changed
towards God, He proclaimed that God was reconciled to him: "This day
thou shalt be with me in Paradise." And hence, speaking humanly,
hence, from this absolving tone and spirit, came His wondrous and
unparalleled power with sinful, erring hearts; hence the life and
fresh impulse which He imparted to the being and experience to those
with whom He dealt. Hence the maniac, freed from the legion, sat at
His feet, clothed, and in his right mind. Hence the outcast woman,
whom human scorn would have hardened into brazen effrontery, hearing
an unwonted voice of human sympathy, "washed His feet with her tears,
and wiped them with the hairs of her head."

And this is what we have forgotten: we have not yet learned to trust
the power of redeeming love; we do not believe in the omnipotence of
grace, and the might of an appeal to the better parts, and not the
slavish parts of h