even of gauging
and examining it. So soon as grief had done its work, the apostle was
anxious to dry useless tears--he even feared lest haply such an one
should be swallowed up with overmuch sorrow. "A true penitent," says
Mr. Newman, "never forgives himself." O false estimate of the gospel
of Christ, and of the heart of man! A proud remorse does not forgive
itself the forfeiture of its own dignity; but it is the very beauty of
the penitence which is according to God, that at last the sinner,
realizing God's forgiveness, does learn to forgive himself. For what
other purpose did St. Paul command the Church of Corinth to give
ecclesiastical absolution, but in order to afford a symbol and
assurance of the Divine pardon, in which the guilty man's grief should
not be overwhelming, but that he should become reconciled to himself?
What is meant by the Publican's going _down to his house_ justified,
but that he felt at peace with himself and God?

3. It is sorrow with God--here called godly sorrow; in the margin
sorrowing according to God.

God sees sin not in its consequences but in itself: a thing infinitely
evil, even if the consequences were happiness to the guilty instead of
misery. So sorrow according to God, is to see sin as God sees it. The
grief of Peter was as bitter as that of Judas. He went out and wept
bitterly; how bitterly none can tell but they who have learned to look
on sin as God does. But in Peter's grief there was an element of hope;
and that sprung precisely from this--that he saw God in it all.
Despair of self did not lead to despair of God.

This is the great, peculiar feature of this sorrow: God is there,
accordingly self is less prominent. It is not a microscopic
self-examination, nor a mourning in which self is ever uppermost: _my_
character gone; the greatness of _my_ sin; the forfeiture of _my_
salvation. The thought of God absorbs all that. I believe the feeling
of true penitence would express itself in such words as these:--There
_is_ a righteousness, though I have not attained it. There is a
purity, and a love, and a beauty, though my life exhibits little of
it. In that I can rejoice. Of that I can feel the surpassing
loveliness. My doings? They are worthless, I cannot endure to think of
them. I am not thinking of them. I have something else to think of.
There, there; in that Life I see it. And so the Christian--gazing not
on what he is, but on what he des