the only answer to the Patriarch's question. He may not have
perfectly understood it--no man ever yet comprehended all its heights
and sounded all its depths! But it is easier to accept it than to reject
it. For, if I reject it, I am confronted by an enigma even more
unanswerable than Job's.

Oh, why was He there as the Bearer of sin
If on Jesus my guilt was not laid?
Oh, why from His side flowed the sin-cleansing stream,
If His dying my debt has not paid?

If, that is to say, the Cross is not the divine answer to the mystery of
all the ages, then who shall attempt to solve the dark, inscrutable,
impenetrable mystery of the Cross?

V

But it is! Experience proves it! In the course of his dazzling
Apocalypse, John tells us that he saw a war being waged in heaven; and
the hosts of righteousness overcame their powerful and sinister foes by
the virtue of the blood of the Lamb. I do not know what he means--never
expect to know in this world. But I know that, in this life, something
very like it happens every day.

Martin Luther says that, in one of his periods of depression at the
Wartburg, it seemed to him that he saw a hideous and malignant form
inscribing the record of his own transgressions round the walls of his
room. There seemed to be no end to the list--sins of thought, sins of
word, sins of deed, sins of omission, sins of commission, secret sins,
open sins--the pitiless scribe wrote on and on interminably. Whilst the
accuser was thus occupied, Luther bowed his head and prayed. When he
looked up again, the writer had paused, and, turning, faced him.

'Thou hast forgotten just one thing!' said Luther.

'And that--?' asked his tormentor.

'Take thy pen once more and write across it all: "_The blood of Jesus
Christ, His Son, cleanseth us from all sin!_"' And, at the utterance of
those words, the spirit vanished and the walls were clean!

In his _Grace Abounding_, Bunyan tells us of a period in his life during
which his soul seemed to be held in fetters of brass; and, every step he
took, he took to the sound of the clanking of chains. 'But about ten or
eleven o'clock on a certain day,' he says, 'as I was walking under a
hedge (full of sorrow and guilt, God knows), suddenly this sentence
rushed in upon me, "_The blood of Jesus Christ, His Son, cleanseth us
from all sin._" At this I made a stand in my spirit and began to
conceive peace in my soul, and methought I saw as if the tempter did
leer and