^ J. Vaughan.
44 THE GREAT TEXTS OF THE BIBLE
none left upon you. I will be as sternly just to you as a righteous and holy God must be, yet I shall not smite you, for I see nothing in you, or upon you, which I ought to smite.' 0 wondrous miracle of mercy and grace ! "
This sequel to the reasoning is surprising enough in its com- pleteness and comprehensiveness, and yet it follows naturally (1) from God's character, (2) from God's promise, (3) from the nature of God's forgiveness.
I. God's Character. He who has seriously " reasoned together " with God is far better prepared to find God in the forgiveness of sins than he who has merely brooded over his own unhappiness without any reference to the qualities and claims of his Judge. It has been a plain and personal matter through- out, and having now come to a clear conviction that he is a guilty sinner, he turns directly to the great and good Being who stands immediately before him, and prays to be forgiven, and is forgiven.
One reason why the soul so often gropes days and months without finding a sin-pardoning God lies in the fact that its thoughts and feelings respecting religious subjects, and par- ticularly respecting the state of the heart, have been too vague and indistinct. They have not had an immediate and close reference to the one single Being who is most directly concerned, and who alone can minister to a mind diseased. The soul is wretched, and there may be some sense of sin, but there is no one to go to — no one to address with an appealing cry. " Oh that I knew where I might find Him," is its language. " Oh that I might come even to His seat. Behold I go forward, but He is not there; and backward, but I cannot perceive Him." But this groping would cease were there a clear view of God.
This suggests two practical directions —
(1) In all states of religious anxiety we should hetake ourselves directly to God. There is no other refuge for the human soul but God in Christ, and if this fails us, we must renounce all hope here and hereafter.
If this fail. The pillared firmament is rottenness, And earth's base built on stubble.
(Milton, Comus, 597-599.)
ISAIAH 45
(2) In all our religious anxiety, we should make a full and plain state7nent of everythiny to God. God loves to hear the details of our sin, and our woe. The soul that pours itself out as water will find that it is not like water spilt upon the ground, which cannot be gathered up again. Even when the story is one of shame and remorse, we find it to be mental relief, patiently and without any reserve or palliation, to expose the whole not only to our own eye but to that of our Judge. For, to this very thing have we been invited. This is precisely the " reasoning together " which God proposes to us.
IF I believe in a man having a place of private resort for the consideration of all the bearings of his life. I have had such places ever since I could remember. I have occasion to go back to them, in recollection, with joy and thanksgiving. Places in far-away quiet fields, where I used to go between school hours and bend my knees behind some blossoming hawthorn hedge, or some old, old tree, and there, as a mere boy in his teens, talk to God till the tears started and life seemed to be going out of me in one great painful shudder. But oh ! the sweetness of those hours ! One came back even to play and enjoyments of a boyish kind, and work, and suffering, with new life and new hope.^
2. God's Promise. God would not have made the demand for reform unless it were possible for man to meet it. Where is the power to meet it to come from ? Only two answers are possible : either it is inherent in man — this is the answer of nature ; or it is supplied from without — this is the answer of grace. The former is the basis of all human efibrts which have been or are being put forth to reform the world ; the latter is the basis of the Divine method.
(1) The answer of Nature. — The belief in the ability of man to reform himself is founded on ignorance of the real nature of his moral condition, as was the case in the pagan world, or on a deliberate refusal to recognise the truth when it is presented concerning that condition, as was the case in Judaism, and is the case at the present day with those who persuade themselves to a belief in the infinite intrinsic capability of human nature. I see no reason, says the modern enthusiast, why a man, given the necessary favourable environments, —
^ J. Parker.
46 THE GREAT TEXTS OF THE BIBLE
which happily are in a fair way to be supplied, — should not, by a little effort, become perfectly good ; why he should not so live as to be able to defy every law in heaven and on earth. Is any one really justified by history or by experience in taking such a view of the question ? Neither the religion of the pagan world, nor the philosophy of the Greeks, nor the power and civilisation of the Eomans — of their religion we say nothing, for it was unworthy of the name — afford much ground for this belief in human nature. Nor could even the Mosaic law by itself awaken in man a power which would enable him to become righteous — " in that it was weak through the flesh." The witness whether of history or of experience little encourages belief in the capacity of human nature to reform itself.