ou love may have it, is
properly a religious act--no hard and dismal duty, because made easy
by affection. To bear pain for the sake of bearing it has in it no
moral quality at all, but to bear it rather than surrender truth, or
in order to save another, is positive enjoyment as well as ennobling
to the soul. Did you ever receive even a blow meant for another in
order to shield that other? Do you not know that there was actual
pleasure in the keen pain far beyond the most rapturous thrill of
nerve which could be gained from pleasure in the midst of
painlessness? Is not the mystic yearning of love expressed in words
most purely thus, Let me suffer for him?

This element of love is that which makes this doctrine an intelligible
and blessed truth. So sacrifice alone, bare and unrelieved, is
ghastly, unnatural, and dead; but self-sacrifice, illuminated by love,
is warmth and life; it is the death of Christ, the life of God, the
blessedness, and only proper life of man.

VIII.

_Preached June 30, 1850._

THE POWER OF SORROW.

"Now I rejoice, not that ye were made sorry, but that ye sorrowed
to repentance: for ye were made sorry after a godly manner, that
ye might receive damage by us in nothing. For godly sorrow worketh
repentance to salvation not to be repented of: but the sorrow of
the world worketh death."--2 Corinthians vii. 9, 10.

That which is chiefly insisted on in this verse, is the distinction
between sorrow and repentance. To grieve over sin is one thing, to
repent of it is another.

The apostle rejoiced, not that the Corinthians sorrowed, but that they
sorrowed unto repentance. Sorrow has two results; it may end in
spiritual life, or in spiritual death; and in themselves, one of these
is as natural as the other. Sorrow may produce two kinds of
reformation--a transient, or a permanent one--an alteration in habits,
which originating in emotion, will last so long as that emotion
continues, and then after a few fruitless efforts, be given up,--a
repentance which will be repented of; or again, a permanent change,
which will be reversed by no after thought--a repentance not to be
repented of. Sorrow is in itself, therefore, a thing neither good nor
bad: its value depends on the spirit of the person on whom it falls.
Fire will inflame straw, soften iron, or harden clay; its effects are
determined by the object with which it comes in contact. Warmth