^ It is not that God is going to judge us some day. That is not the awful thing. It is that God knows us now. If I stop an instant and know that God knows me through all these miscon- ceptions and blunders of my brethren, that God knows me — that is the awful thing. The future judgment shall but tell it. It is here, here upon my conscience, now.^
^ 0 Great Mercy of God, I beseech Thee deliver me from the Bonds of Satan. I have no Eefuge in any Thing, but only in Thy Holy Wounds and Death. Into Thee I sink down in the Anguish of my Conscience, do with me what Thou wilt. In Thee I will now live or die as pleaseth Thee, let me but die and perish in Thy Death ; do but bury me into Thy Death, that the Anguish of Hell may not touch me. How can I excuse myself before Thee, that knowest my Heart and Eeins, and settest my Sins before mine Eyes ? I am guilty of them, and yield myself unto Thy Judgment ; accomplish Thy Judgment upon me, through the Death of my Eedeemer Jesus Christ.^
3. Confession is inevitable whenever we come into the presence of God. When we draw near to God and behold the light of His countenance the sense of our imperfection must be the instant emotion stirred in the mind, and the first act — the expression of this emotion — must be confession. For confession is not making something known to God. It is God making something known to us ; it is God revealing us to ourselves, and our cry of pain at the discovery. It comes from the shock of contrast. To know ourselves we need the help of contrast. To know and see ourselves truly we need a much more searching light than that which comes from moral mediocrity. We need the highest light attainable, and that is the light of God's countenance. Then the sombre recesses of the soul, and all they contain, reveal themselves ; and so do its secret bypaths, where the unclean spirits have left their footprints. Confession must be the instant spontaneous product of the vision of God.
^ Are you ready with your account which you will have to render to God ; have you kept one at all ? Sometimes when men appear before a court they plead that they have no books, and
^ Phillips Brooks, Addresses, 19. ^ Jacob Behmen.
ROMANS XIV. 12 425
it is always a bad sign. You know what the judge thinks of them. Can you dare to examine yourself, and answer questions ? Can you give an account of your stewardship? Have you kept it correctly, or have you credited yourself with large things where you ought to have debited yourself ? Your fraud will be dis' covered, for the great Accountant will read it through, and will detect an error in a single moment. Is your account kept correctly, and are you ready to render it at this moment ? ^
Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord: He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath
are stored; He hath loosed the fatal lightning of His terrible swift sword ; His truth is marching on.
I have seen Him in the watch-fires of a hundred circling
camps ; They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and
damps ; I can read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring
lamps:
His day is marching on.
I have read a fiery gospel, writ in burnished rows of steel: " As ye deal with My contemners, so with you My grace shall
deal; Let the Hero, born of woman, crush the serpent with His heel ! Since God is marching on."
He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call
retreat ; He is sifting out the hearts of men before His judgment-seat; Oh ! be swift, my soul, to answer Him ! be jubilant, my feet ! Our God is marching on.
In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born, across the sea. With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me: As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free, While God is marching on.^
^ C. H. Spurgeon.
' Julia Ward Howe, BcUtle-Hymn of the Republic
426 OUR ACCOUNTABILITY
III.
It is Personal.
" Each one of us shall give account of himself.**
1. It would not be difficult for many of us to give an account, more or less exhaustive, of others. We spend our time in thinking them over, talking them over, discussing them. We know, it may be, some true things about them ; we suspect a great deal which is not true but utterly false. To some of us, it may be, this dis- cussion of others presents itself as at once an amusement and a relief. It is an amusement, for it costs us nothing to dwell on their failings ; and human nature, when we have no immediate stake in it, is always amusing. And it is a relief. To talk about others keeps us at the circumference of our own life ; far, very far away from the centre ; we do not wish to be with ourselves, within ourselves, alone with om-selves. There are wounds beneath the surface which we would not or dare not probe; there are memories from which we fly, if we can manage it, to something outside and beyond them. Yet, after all, it is of ourselves that we shall have to give account. Others will come into that account only so far as they depend on us ; so far as we may have wronged or injured or otherwise affected them. Their shortcomings may now take that place in our thoughts which ought to be given to our own. But a day will come when this will be impracticable. We shall be isolated before the Eternal Judge. We shall form part of a countless multitude, but He will deal with each one of us as if we stood alone before Him and all the rays of His Infinite Wisdom and Justice were concentrated on our case.