3. If it is a fact that sin has its punishment — if it be true that, go wherever I may, my sin follows me and will find me out — " How am I to be saved ? " I wiU tell you. You have, first of all, to find your sin out instead of waiting for sin to find
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you. You say, " How can I do that ? " Discover it by the law. If you have any doubt whether you are a sinner or not, run through the Ten Commandments, and then look at them in a spiritual light, remembering that be who sins in desire virtually sins in action. Then turn to the third chapter of Komans, and see whether it condemns you or not. Do not spare yourself. Drag your sins out of their hiding-places. Call them by their right names. Say to the iniquity of your heart, " Come, sin, if I do not find you out you will find me out. If I do not drag you from your lurking-place you will drag me into perdition." Out with your sin and judge yourself as in the sight of God. And then, when you have settled the question that you are a sinner, and a sinner who deserves punishment, go and take all the hideous load to Christ. This is the only way a man can be saved. Get your sins found out ; and when you have seen them, though they appear like a very mountain of guilt, say, in the language of the hymn —
I lay my sins on Jesus,
The spotless Lamb of God.
^ The punishment of sin is inevitable. As sins against natural laws are invariably punished, as fire burns, no matter whose be the hand that is in it, so sin uniformly and in every case brings spiritual degradation. The laws of our spiritual nature are "self-acting," as are the other laws with which we have to do. No sin is committed without leaving its mark. But you say, " There is repentance." You know little of the power of sin if you thus glibly promise yourself repentance. Listen to the confession of one who has a foremost place in English literature, and who was not judged by his contemporaries to have sinned to any dangerous extent. " Of a change in my condition there is no hope. The waters have gone over me. But out of the black depths I would cry out to all those who have but set a foot in the perilous flood. Could the youth, to whom the flavour of his first sinful enjoyment is delicious as the opening scenes of life, or the entering upon some newly discovered paradise, look into my desolation, and be made to understand what a dreary thing it is when a man shall feel himself going down a precipice with open eyes and a passive will — to see this destruction and have no power to stop it, and yet to feel it all the way emanating from himself ; to perceive all goodness emptied out of him and yet not to be able to forget a time when it was otherwise ; to bear about
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the piteous spectacle of his own self -ruins ; could he feel the body of the death out of which I cry hourly with feebler and feebler outcry to be delivered — it were enough to make him dash aside the most pressing or subtle temptation." What can such a man make of repentance ? Is he not more likely to class himself with those who seek it when the door is shut ; who know that others have abandoned sin and have entered into life, but that they are «hut out in outer darkness ? Repentance is not at our beck ; and to sin for a little longer in the expectation that you can repent at pleasure is a complete misunderstanding of the surest laws of your nature. Repentance is never easy, and every day becomea more difficult.^
Thy mercy greater is than any sin,
Thy greatness none can ever comprehend:
Wherefore, O Lord, let me Thy mercy win, Whose glorious name no time can ever end:
Wherefore I say all praise belongs to Thee,
Whom I beseech be merciful to me.
4 What, then, has Christ accomplished for us ? Does He fltand between the sinner and the natural consequences of his sin ? To answer this question we have but to look to the first sinner saved after His death, the thief who hung beside Him on the cross. What this sinner received from Christ was not immunity from the consequences of sin, but assurance of God's favour and of Christ's friendship. Of the natural results of his life of crime there was no reversal, no mitigation. Christ's power was not put forth to imfasten the criminal from the cross he had ■earned. There are cases in which this insvitable law is obscured. For in life much is sown besides our sin of which we reap the fruit, and sometimes by the foresight of friends or by the providence of God we are saved from the results of our own deeds. What others do for our good has its result. But the one thing we can calculate on is that we must reap as we have sown, and that Christ's work does not interfere with this law.