72 THE BEATITUDE OF FORGIVENESS
directed. All sin, big or little, is a blunder. It is a blunder even if it hits what it aims at, for it aims at the wrong thing. So doubly, all transgression is folly, and the true name for the doer is " Thou fool ! " For every evil misses the mark which, regard being had to the man's obvious destiny, he ought to aim at. " Man's chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy Him for ever " ; and whosoever in all his successes fails to realize that end is a failure through and through, in whatever smaller matters he may seem to himself and to others to succeed.
IF Full of far deeper love for what I remember of Turner himself, as I become better capable of understanding it, I find myself more and more helpless to explain his errors and his sins. His errors, I might say, simply. Perhaps, some day, people will again begin to remember the force of the old Greek word for sin ; and to learn that all sin is in essence — "Missing the mark"; losing sight or consciousness of heaven ; and that this loss may be various in its guilt ; it cannot be judged by us.^
(3) But the Psalmist sees in his own past behaviour not only rebellion and failure, but iniquity — that is, something twisted or distorted. His conduct is thus brought into contrast with the right line of the plain, straight path in which we ought to walk. We have the same metaphor in our own language. We talk about things being right and wrong, by which we mean, in the one case, parallel with the rigid law of duty, and in the other case, " wrung," or wavering, crooked and divergent from it. There is a standard as well as a Judge, and we have to think of evil not only as being rebellion against God and separation from Him, and as, for ourselves, issuing in fatal missing of the mark, but also as being divergent from the one manifest law to which we ought to be conformed. The path to God is a right line ; the shortest road from earth to Heaven is absolutely straight.
^ Every person of a mature age, and in his right mind, remembers turns or crises in his life, where he met the question of wrong face to face, and by a hard inward struggle broke through the sacred convictions of duty that rose up to fence him back. It was some new sin to which he had not become familiar, so much worse perhaps in degree as to be the entrance to him consciously of a new stage of guilt. He remembers how it shook his soul and even his body; how he shrunk in guilty anticipation from the
* Raskin, Modern Painters, v. pt. ix. chap. xii. ( Works, vii. 441).
PSALM XXXII. I, 2 ^i
new step of wrong ; the sublime misgiving that seized him, the awkward and but half-possessed manner in which it was taken, and then afterward, perhaps even after years have passed away, how, in some quiet hour of the day or the wakeful hour of night, as the recollection of that deed — not a public crime, but a wrong, or an act of vice — returned upon him, the blood rushed back for the moment on his fluttering heart, the pores of his skin opened, and a kind of agony of shame and self-condemnation, in one word of remorse, seized his whole person. This is the consciousness, the guilty pang, of sin ; every man knows what it is.^
2. Corresponding to the three terms for sin, there are three expressions to signify its removal. The first word means taken away or lifted off, as a burden from aching shoulders. It implies more than holding back penal consequences ; it is the removal of sin itself, and that not merely in the multitudinousness of its manifestations in act, but in the depth of its inward source. This is the metaphor which Bunyan has made so familiar by his picture of the pilgrim losing his load at the cross. The second (" covered ") paints pardon as God's shrouding the foul thing from His pure eyes, so that His action is no longer determined by its existence. The third describes forgiveness as God's not reckoning a man's sin to him, in which expression hovers some allusion to cancelling a debt.
(1) Sin is here pictured as a burden, lying on the soul. Every sin we commit is making that burden larger and heavier. We do not say it is fdt to be heavier ; that would be the sen^e of dn. The burden is there, whether it be felt or not, and it always grows. If the burden of his sin remains on any sinner it will sink him into ruin. Surely, then, he is a happy man whose burden of sin is lifted off. " Oh, the blessedness of the man whose burden of sin is lifted off ! " Why is he a blessed man ? Because when the burden of sin goes, other things must go with it. When this burden is lifted off, the sentence of death against the sinner is cancelled for ever, the gates of hell are closed against him and will never open to admit him, and heaven's gates are open in a new sense, in that they never can be closed till he is inside.