a vacancy as yet unfilled by virtue. It is hard to
think that people held by a half-sceptical pantheism, and the
relativity of evil, have ever been face to face with the awful deeps
and disobediences of their own heart, or have felt the hot breath of
the devil on their own cheek. If we have any worth-discerning faculty,
we know when a man is handling certain subjects whether he knows what
he is talking about; whether or not, to use an expressive
colloquialism, "he has been there." No man who with the eyes of the
soul has looked down that awful cleft that separates between the carnal
mind and the holy will of God, can use words here under the wasting
impression that he knows things. If Christ only died to save us from
something which, after all, is only good in the making, then the Cross
of Calvary is the supreme irony of time. We shall never find a Saviour
by the road that, at the most, leads but to a martyr.

Here is a man--and he is not an imaginary case--who is married, and has
young people growing up in the home. He is wealthy, with a reputable
position in society. But there is a sinister something in the
background of his life, and he sets himself to do what he knows full
well is an irreparable wrong to an inexperienced and defenceless
creature. He makes no fight against the wicked prompting, and does the
hurt which if another man were to do to one of his own family he would
willingly shoot him dead. And say when the hurt is done, a
searchlight--he knows not whence it comes--is flashed across his soul
and he sees himself as he is, a base scoundrel before God and man, will
it help him to think of his sin as good in the making? For whatever he
may become, he has done his part to damn another. And let his
conscience become, as it can become, and woe to him if it do not
become, as real as the wicked thing he has done, and his first and
devastating question will be, not can God forgive him, but can he ever
forgive himself? Let his one hope come to be in some means of
expiation, which can give him a degree of rest from the sin by paying
what he can of its wages, and he will begin to realize what is meant,
not by the remission of the consequences of sin, but by the remission
of sin. He will know the need, where the need is agony, which God in
Christ has met for us, and which, had He not met, would have left the
need something greater than God Himself. It is when a man must have
peace with himself or die to