n
that St. Paul must help to restore in us. We must believe {127} that
God is holy, and we must learn to tremble under His necessary holiness,
before we can in any right sense realize that He is loving. We must
learn once again to be really penitent; to confess our sins in general
and in particular with utter humiliation; to expect the divine
judgement upon them; to use with reality the stern language about sin
of the Bible and the Prayer Book. And learning this for ourselves with
regard to our own personal sins, we must learn also to feel, like
Daniel, what our church and nation deserve in God's sight. We must
confess our own sins and the sins of church and nation[4]--aye, of the
human race. Only through such a restoration of evangelical severity
can there be a restoration of evangelical joy. The deepened sense of
personal sin is the needful step to spiritual progress. Certainly no
more in our case than in that of the Jews will orthodoxy, or ritual
accuracy, or frequent services, or superior education, or philanthropic
zeal, be accepted as a substitute for moral severity, for the spirit of
penitence and the readiness for penance. Let us judge ourselves,
brethren, that we be not judged of the Lord.

And it is all-important what our standard of {128} judgement is. The
Jews failed because they judged themselves by a mainly external and
therefore easy standard. So do most respectable Englishmen. We are
satisfied if we do nothing discreditable. But the religious sense of
sin, as it is experienced by the psalmists, or St. Paul, or Luther, or
John Keble, arises from the intense perception of a personal relation
to the All-Holy. The 'falling short,' or rather 'experienced need[5],'
of which St. Paul goes on to speak, is the experienced need of
something very lofty, to which it is possible for men to be quite
insensible--'the glory of God.' God's divine brightness, the eternal
light, streams forth into nature. 'The whole earth is full of His
glory.' Man also in his natural and moral being is meant to have
fellowship with God. He is meant for the divine glory also. It is in
proportion as he realizes what he was meant for, and becomes conscious
in himself of a capacity for God, that his present actual pollution and
sinfulness becomes a reality to his consciousness. It is in the light
of God, {129} and in aspiration after the glory of God, that the sense
of sin really awakens. 'Thou requirest truth in the inwar