r an obstacle to us in our speech with Him, our trust in Him--our
using the energies of God for the accomplishment of His purposes. It
is the restoration of the human spirit to right relations with God.
Forgiveness of sins conies, therefore, at the very start of a right
life. It is the beginning. All else in the spiritual life succeeds
upon this.

I know there is a theory among us, and I am prepared to endorse it,
that, if we are trained by godly parents in godly homes, we may grow
into the spiritual life, pass into it, as it were, by stages which it
is impossible for us to register. We are largely unconscious of
these spiritual ascents; they are being made by the gracious use
of influences that are in our environment, that reach us through
sanctified folk, and we travel on from strength to strength, and,
then, perchance, in our young manhood or womanhood, there comes a
crisis of revelation, and we discover that we are in such relations
with God our Father, Redeemer, and Renewer as fill us with peace,
create hope and conscious strength. But I assure you that in addition
to this experience there will come, it may be early, it may be late,
some moment in the life when there is discovered to the individual
spirit making that ascent a sense of the awful heinousness of sin; and
tho we may not have such a unique experience of evil as the Apostle
Paul had, and become so conscious of it as to feel, as it were, that
it is a dead body that we have to carry about with us as we go through
life, interfering with the very motions of our spirit; yet we do
approximate to it, and it is through these approximations to
the Apostle Paul that we are lifted to the heights of spiritual
achievement, and are qualified for sympathy with a sin-stricken world,
and inspired by and nourished in a passionate enthusiasm to serve that
world by bringing it into right relations with God.

When, therefore, a man says, "I believe in God the Father Almighty,
maker of heaven and earth," he is asserting that which, being turned
to its full and true use, carries him to this goal, "I believe in the
forgiveness of sins." For a full and true doctrine of God can only
be heartily welcomed when it is associated with the message of the
forgiveness of sins. Otherwise the visions of the eternal Power may
start in us the cry of Peter: "Depart from me, for I am a sinful man,
O Lord," When a man asserts his faith in Jesus Christ, God's only Son,
our Lord, who was crucif