rden
were lifted off them, a clog removed. The "sense of sin" has
disappeared, and with it the gnawing pain. They know the springtime of
the soul, the word of power which makes all things new. A song of
gratitude wells up as the natural outburst of the heart, the time for
the singing of birds is come, there is "joy among the Angels." This not
uncommon experience is one that becomes puzzling, when the person
experiencing it, or seeing it in another, begins to ask himself what has
really taken place, what has brought about the change in consciousness,
the effects of which are so manifest.

Modern thinkers, who have thoroughly assimilated the idea of changeless
laws underlying all phenomena, and who have studied the workings of
these laws, are at first apt to reject any and every theory of the
forgiveness of sins as being inconsistent with that fundamental truth,
just as the scientist, penetrated with the idea of the inviolability of
law, repels all thought which is inconsistent with it. And both are
right in founding themselves on the unfaltering working of law, for law
is but the expression of the divine Nature, in which there is no
variableness, neither shadow of turning. Any view of the forgiveness of
sins that we may adopt must not clash with this fundamental idea, as
necessary to ethical as to physical science. "The bottom would fall out
of everything" if we could not rest securely in the everlasting arms of
the Good Law.

But in pursuing our investigations, we are struck with the fact that the
very Teachers who are most insistent on the changeless working of law
are also those who emphatically proclaim the forgiveness of sins. At one
time Jesus is saying: "That every idle word that men shall speak, they
shall give account thereof in the day of judgment,"[313] and at
another: "Son, be of good cheer, thy sins be forgiven thee."[314] So in
the _Bhagavad Gita_ we read constantly of the bonds of action, that "the
world is bound by action,"[315] and that a man "recovereth the
characteristics of his former body;"[316] and yet it is said that "even
if the most sinful worship me, with undivided heart, he, too, must be
accounted righteous."[317] It would seem, then, that whatever may have
been intended in the world's Scriptures by the phrase, "the forgiveness
of sins," it was not thought, by Those who best know the law, to clash
with the inviolable sequence of cause and effect.

If we examine even the crudest idea of the f