aith alone that man is separated from his sins and reconciled to
God. A demonstration of love, too, must be given in act; it is not
enough to be told that God loves: the reality of love lies in another
region than that of words. In Christ on His cross the very thing
itself is present, beyond all hope of telling wonderful, and without
its irresistible appeal our hearts could never have been melted to
penitence, and won for God. On the other hand, there are those who
reject the Atonement on the very ground that for pardon and
reconciliation nothing is required but repentance, the assumption being
that repentance is something which man can and must produce out of his
own resources.

On these divergent tendencies in the modern mind I should wish to make
the following remarks.

First, the idea that man can repent as he ought, and whenever he will,
without coming under any obligation to God for his repentance, but
rather (it might almost be imagined) putting God under obligation by
it, is one to which experience lends no support. Repentance is an
adequate sense not of our folly, nor of our misery, but of our sin: as
the New Testament puts it, it is repentance _toward God_. It is the
consciousness of what our sin is to Him: of the wrong it does to His
holiness, of the wound which it inflicts on His love. Now such a
consciousness it is not in the power of the sinner to produce at will.
The more deeply he has sinned, the more (so to speak) repentance is
needed, the less is it in his power. It is the very nature of sin to
darken the mind and harden the heart, to take away the knowledge of God
alike in His holiness and in His love. Hence it is only through a
revelation of God, and especially of what God is in relation to sin,
that repentance can be evoked in the soul. Of all terms in the
vocabulary of religion, repentance is probably the one which is most
frequently misused. It is habitually applied to experiences which are
not even remotely akin to true penitence. The self-centred regret
which a man feels when his sin has found him out--the wish, compounded
of pride, shame, and anger at his own inconceivable folly, that he had
not done it: these are spoken of as repentance. But they are not
repentance at all. They have no relation to God. They constitute no
fitness for a new relation to Him. They are no opening of the heart in
the direction of His reconciling love. It is the simple truth that
that sorrow of hear