IF All great dramatists and novelists insist upon the fact that sinners cannot cleanse themselves from the inevitable stain which sin always leaves. Shakespeare has painted this truth in its most glaring colours in Macbeth. Macbeth speaks after the murder —
" Whence is that knocking ? How is't with me, when every noise appals me ? What hands are here ? ha ! they pluck out mine eyes ! Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood Clean from my hand ? No ; this my hand will rather The multitudinous seas incarnadine, Making the green one red."
Lady Macbeth. " My hands are of your colour, but I shame To wear a heart so white. {Knock). I hear a knocking At the south entry : retire we to our chamber : A little water clears us of this deed : How easy is it, then !"
But in the night time, walking in her sleep. Lady Macbeth is conscious that she cannot remove the stain left by the murder of Banquo : —
Gent. "It is an accustom'd action with her, to seem thus washing her hands : I have known her continue in this a quarter of an hour."
Lady Macbeth. " Yet here's a spot. . . . Out, damned spot ! out, I gay ! — One, two ; why, then 'tis time to do't. — Hell is murky ! — Fie, my lord, fie ! a soldier, and afeard ? What need we fear who knows it, when none can call our power to account ? — Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him ? . . . Here's the smell of the blood still : all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand. Oh, oh, oh ! "
ISAIAH 47
f " There is a lonely little pool of water in a hollow on the mountainside near Tarbet, Loch Lomond, called the Fairy Loch. If you look into it you will see a great many colours in the water, owing to the varied nature of the materials that form its bottom. There is a legend about it which says that the fairies used to dye things for the people round about, if a specimen of the colour was left along with the cloth on the brink of the pool at sunset. One evening a shepherd left beside the Fairy Loch the fleece of a black sheep, and placed upon it a white woollen thread to show that he wished the fleece dyed white. This fairly puzzled the good folk. They could dye a white fleece any colour: but to make a black fleece white was impossible. In despair they threw all their colours into the loch, giving it its present strange look, and disappeared for ever."^
(2) The answer of Grace. — A power from without is abso- lutely necessary to enable man to meet the demand for reform. This power is God's forgiveness. " Come now, and let us reason together," or better, " let us end the dispute " ; " though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow ; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool." Although the demand precedes the offer of forgiveness, we are not to suppose that the work of reforming is to precede the enjoyment of the Divine gift. That indeed were impossible. The demand is stated first, in order to invite our attention to the special duty we are called upon to perform; but simultaneously we are invited to contemplate the Divine settlement of the dispute by the offer of pardon on God's side ; and this assurance of pardon awakens within us a desire, and imparts to us a prayer, to do our duty ; in a word, to reform. This then is the appropriate gift for this task, or rather, we ought to say, this is the par- ticular form in which the fulness of Divine love is given for this special work. As every duty of man is summed up in the command to reform, so all the riches of grace are summed up in the gift of pardon.
3. God's Pardon. What peculiar virtue or power does pardon possess for producing a change of life ?
(1) First it induces the resolution to reform, then becomes a power in the penitent man to help him to carry out his resolu- tion. Pardon thus bridges the chasm which exists between a knowledge of duty and the doing of it. Many, we believe, are
^ Hugh Macmillan.
48 THE GREAT TEXTS OF THE BIBLE
convicted of sin, and even repent, but stop there. A belief in the Divine forgiveness, moreover, would lead them on to the sphere of actual reform. As pardon soothes the troubled mind under conviction of sin, so it stimulates the perverse will to good action, and supplies the heart with a sufficiently strong motive power to all well-doing.
IT Matthew Arnold has not been a kind critic of religion — his teachings about this very book are one-sided and unsatisfactory; but, at least, with all his faults, he has given us one lesson, he has accentuated it so strongly that it cannot easily pass away from our minds, and we certainly cannot be too anxious to reduce it to practice. The lesson is that the greater part of religion is con- duct— not singing of hymns, not offering of prayers, not gathering in sanctuaries, not giving in collections, but conduct.^