3. The death of the soul is not a necessity, for an antidote has been provided. Those who have within them the sentence of death may feel the quickening touch of Christ and begin to live. It was the mission of Christ to bring life to dying men. " I am come," He says, " that they might have life." And Paul, writing to the Christians at Ephesus of the power of Christ, says : " You hath he quickened who were dead in trespasses and sins." When a sick man has an efficacious remedy placed before him there is no reason why he should die. And yet his disease may run to a fatal end if he refuses to take the remedy provided. Sinful men die, not because they are sinners, but because they refuse the remedy which Heaven has provided for sin.
God in Christ does not forget even where a father might
forget, or forsake even where a mother might be found forsaking.
No, He will defer judgment, He will delay the crisis, He will set
Himself to forestall the doom that must work itself out as the
1 Ruskin, Fors Clavigera (Appendix, No. 24).
EZEKIEL xxxiii. it 209
issue of sin. God willed that none should perish ; He willed that all should be summed up in Christ, and that to be in Christ should have force to rescue, cleanse, renew, and glorify the entire body of mankind, and even if at last there will be found a residue of stubborn defiance in the human will which can hold out against the fullest effort even of Divine pardon, yet that will be only through wilful refusal to suffer the whole will of God to make itself felt. Still it will remain true that the intention, the purpose, the hope of God is that in Christ every soul should be brought to salvation. And if so, we must not sink the scale because the hope seems to us so distant and so broken, we must measure the Father's actions according to the width and breadth of His perfect scheme.
Austere as we must be against sin, we will still remember that Christ died for sinners ; that unless they hear Him they will die ; and if, at some darker hour, our hearts sink as we wonder whether anything is achieved, whether it can be worth while to wait and trust, then let us remind ourselves that we have no gauge by which to measure the gains and the losses. We are not in a position to estimate God's winnings, for we know not yet what we shall be hereafter, we know not what God may have in store ; and, in view of that hereafter hidden from our eyes, He may well be gaining more than we think out of this dark, chaotic probation on earth. For God gains, let us remember, if only He can save a soul from the deliberate recoil from holiness which makes the case desperate; He gains, if only He can secure in a soul that its deepest wish, its last core of will, has yet some- thing in it of belief in goodness, of appeal to God, some inner motion at its root which issues at last out of life's trials into the other world with an upward and not a downward tendency. If only He can win that, then there are at least some possibilities hereafter, there is something secured which the discipline and purging of spiritual penitence can cherish and quicken, and the soul, it may be, may be saved " though as by fire," though " with many stripes."
^j Salvation must be as freely accepted by man as it is offered by God. We find men in this life so defiant of goodness and grace that we cannot assert that final impenitence is impossible. The grace of God in Christ now appears so sufficient, so urgent,
JER.-MAL. — 14
2io GOD AND THE SINNER
so final that we cannot conceive what more God can do to save man. We may desire and hope that all shall be saved, but we cannot assert the salvation of all, and must recognize the pos- sibility of a final impenitence. We must leave the issue of God's world to God's wisdom, holiness, and grace.1
T| If there be a Divine purpose for mankind, its universality must either be something real or something nominal. If nominal only, then the universal offer of benefits that are not intended for all becomes a solemn farce, " inconsistent with the truthfulness and goodness of God," an impossible creed which no honest man can proclaim to his fellow -men. Both Wesley and Erskine taught that the benefits of grace, as they ought to be fully and freely offered to mankind, are also intended for mankind, and to a certain extent are really and truly bestowed on mankind. " As through one trespass the justification came unto all men to condemnation, so through one act of righteousness the free gift came unto all men to justification of life." Erskine's interpreta- tion of these words is, that as every man has been born into an order of sin, so every man is born into an order of grace ; or, to put it otherwise, as Adam inflicted on the world a sentence of death, so Christ has brought a universal seed of life into the world which is available for all those who do not reject it.2