^ The woman took Jesus at His word. Man though He was, somehow she felt that when He spoke God spoke, and that He could do as He said. She felt that this Man had the value of God. And, trusting Him, she felt in her soul the " rest " of God's forgiveness. And now
The opening heavens around her shone With beams of sacred bliss.
Earth was Paradise Kegained ; freedom was hers and a clean soul , the peace of God entered her heart.^
When God, the ever-living, makes
His home in deathly winter frost, And God, the ever-loving, wakes
In hardening eyes of woman lost, Then through the midnight moves a wraith : Open the door, for this is Faith.
Open the door, and bring her in.
And stir thy heart's poor fires that shrink.
Oh, fear to see her pale and thin.
Give love and dreams to eat and drink;
For Faith may faint in wandering by —
In that day thou shalt surely die.^
* G. S. Walker, The Pictures of the Divine Artist, 72. ^ Edward Ellis.
i88 FORGIVENESS
(2) Saving faith implies penitence. In the case of the sinful woman there was penitence too deep for words — the broken and contrite heart which God will not despise, a loathing of sin which this Pharisee cannot understand, and a glowing love which made his frown forgotten in the irresistible attraction to a Saviour's feet. What worlds of emotion may be passing within, where man cannot look, a bitterness of grief which the heart alone knows, and a joy with which no stranger can intermeddle ! He knows it who is its Author and its End. He sees the birth of an immortal spirit, the glow and grandeur of a second creation better than the first, and welcomed with gladder songs. But all the while the poor Pharisee, in presence of its tokens, can understand it no more than he can hear the angels who rejoice over it ; and he complacently charges with ignorance Him who searches the heart, and proudly condemns her who is being acquitted by the Judge of all !
^ At the gateway of the Parthenon in Athens was an altar dedicated to Tears. No sacrifices were consumed, no votive offerings placed upon it; but the sorrowing bowed there and wept out their sorrows. It was the shadowing forth of a great truth ; to wit, " The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit ; a broken and a contrite heart, 0 God, thou wilt not despise" (Ps. li. 17). Dearer to God than all the misereres of the chanting Pharisees is the cry of the returning prodigal. He sees him bowed with penitence, and goes out to meet him while he is yet a great way off.^
(3) The deepest penitence does not imply the greatest sin. The highest degrees of sin-consciousness may be experienced by the man who is outwardly the most correct in conduct, and who has ever been,
Thro' all this tract of years Wearing the white flower of a blameless Ufa
The greatest saint may know and feel himself to be " the chief of sinners." It is Paul — the man so conspicuously Christ-like, so unique in Christian excellence — who so characterizes himself. It is the Psalms of David — the man after God's own heart — that are so blotted with tears, and so vocal with sobs of distress and penitential prayers. It is that eminent saint, Francis of Assisi,
^ D. J. Burrell, Christ and Men, 253.
f
ST. LUKE VII. 50 189
of whom it is said that he wept so much over his sins that he injured his eyesight, and who, in reply to remonstrance, said: "I would rather choose to lose the sight of my body than to repress those tears by which the interior eyes are purified that they may see God." It was George Herbert who, when he lay dying, said : " I am sorry I have nothing to present to my merciful God but sin and misery, but the first is pardoned, and a few hours will put an end to the latter."
^ One thing very remarkable during those last years must have struck all who conversed intimately with Erskine — his ever deepening sense of the evil of sin, and the personal way in which he took this home to himself. Small things done or said years ago would come back upon him and lie on his conscience, often painfully. Things which few other men would have ever thought of again, and which when told to others would seem trifling or harmless, were grievous to him in remembrance. " I know that God has forgiven me for these things," he would say, "but I cannot forgive myself." ^
^ There is no better test of spiritual growth than increasing sensitiveness to the repulsiveness of all kinds of sin, and deepen- ing consciousness of the constant peril from it in which every human soul lives. In the greatest saint there are all the possibilities which, being worked out, make the greatest sinner ; and the truer the saintliuess the deeper the consciousness of this fact. The materials out of which heaven and hell are builded are found in every life, and the man who slov/ly builds heaven within him has constantly the terrible knowledge that he has only to put his hand forth in another direction in order to build hell ; both are within reach.^