this series. I am not sure that I can keep my word.
What has been said will glance from your mind unless you have, like
Luther, and for the same reason, wrestled with the question: "How shall
a man be just with God?" But assuming that as yet this is outside your
experience, still you know the difference between what may but
arbitrarily be called sin, and sin that is what it is called. Believe
me when I say that the first, and worst, and nearest of all problems
for each man of us, and for societies, is the fact of sin; and that
with it no one deals, or can deal, save Him upon whom the chastisement
of our peace was laid, and with whose stripes we are healed. What is
the exact relation between the death of Christ and the forgiveness of
sin no one can tell us; but that there is a relation charged with
redeeming power is not a theory about Christianity--it is Christianity.

I read some time ago that a "Van Missioner," who was preaching
Unitarianism in the villages of Hampshire, found himself at one of them
interrupted by a number of farm labourers, who began to sing--

"What can wash away my sin?
Nothing but the blood of Jesus!
What can make me whole again?
Nothing but the blood of Jesus.
It washes white as snow,
No other fount I know."

To the modern enlightenment which patronizes Jesus as a teacher and
rejects Christ as a Saviour, the theology, or sentiment, in these lines
is not so much crude as grotesque. At the best it is but curiously
reminiscent of the ignorance of a by-gone day. Doubtless this
well-meaning man had much to say worth hearing; but he was talking in
the name of religion, and to these villagers there was in it the lack
of the one thing, which is the lack of all. Theology apart, these
simple folk found in these crude lines the heart of saving truth. It
is my conviction that they were right. In this conviction I live, and
in it, by God's grace, I trust I may die and live again.

"I do not despise Jesus: with all that is best in me do I reverence Him
as one of the world's supreme teachers; but I cannot regard Him as more
than that," said a friend to me after reading over the manuscript of
this address. "And yet," he added quietly, "if there is anything in
Christianity which distinguishes it from any other great religion, it
must be near to the place you have been trying to get at."

'WHAT MUST I DO TO BE SAVED?'

"What must I do to be saved?"--Acts xvi. 30