n unpardoned and as yet unpunished criminal
awaiting your doom. All this is absolutely your state--

IF--

If Jesus Christ were not Almighty God.

If Jesus Christ were not Almighty God, he had no authority nor power
to forgive your sins. NO! And if Jesus Christ were not God I know
not where to bid you turn. You must carry the load of your sins all
your days; and when you die, go into eternity and face a holy God
who tells you by every law and fact of nature that he never forgives
in a single case till he has first punished the sin and with it the
sinner.

If Jesus Christ were not God, his death was not an atonement.

And this surely should be plain enough.

Only God can atone to God.

Only an infinite being can satisfy an infinite being.

If Jesus Christ were not God he could not make an atonement.

If he did not make an atonement, then the world has never been
reconciled to God nor brought up on mercy ground. Instead of being
lifted up to the plane of grace and mercy, the world is still under
the condemnation and judgment of God, no longer under a suspended
sentence, but sheer and defenceless, with nothing to hinder the
crash of doom at any moment.

There is no hope. There is no daysman. There is no one to offer unto
God what he demands, and unto man what he needs. There is no
mediator between a holy God and a sinful man.

If Jesus Christ were not God, then he did not rise from the dead. He
did not bring life and immortality to light, and, as for me, the
preacher, I have no light to hold out to you in the all-embracing
gloom and night of death.

There is no hope.

If a man shall tell me there is no hereafter, that death ends all, I
shall take up the law of induction and argue him to a standstill
along the line of unfathomable mysteries and inexplicable
psychological phenomena in the constitution of man, and the
inexplicable absence of the phenomena in the state of death,
inexplicable upon any known materialistic ground, and I shall laugh
at his inability to maintain his thesis beyond the poor shred of a
hypothesis. If a man shall tell me as the result of pure reasoning
that he concludes for the endless existence of the soul after death,
and shall do this even upon the plane of induction, I shall turn and
tell him that all his argument is based upon inference and not fact,
finding its largest emphasis in the region of the unknowable and
guessable--in the things he cannot explain, where certain
conclus