tianity, extensively prevails throughout the so-called Christian world. Romanism in France, Italy, Germany, and Spain is often a mere cover, and scarcely a cover, for some form of infidelity. And the same is the case with much of the Protestantism of Continental Europe, and even of Great Britain and of the United States.

Infidels often make their proud boast that Christianity, through their great discoveries, is well-nigh obsolete. The history of the world proves abundantly that mankind, left to themselves, or supplied with all the reformatory means in operation before Christ, are likely to be forever the slaves of Satan, and need the mightiest divine interposition for their salvation from delusion and sin.

Punishment of Sin.

The Bible and all rational observation testify that wickedness is followed by misery, known to be punishment for sin. A sense of guilt and a fear of evil always follow wickedness. When God placed man in the world, and laid on him a command as a test of his loyalty, he said to him: "In the day thou transgressest thou shalt surely die." The words may be interpreted as a prediction, or a threat, or both. The result, as well as the nature of the case, is our best guide to the correct interpretation. It could not but be that sin would introduce into the soul intestine war, a sense of degradation, remorse, and fear.

Cain was a miserable, soul-harassed wretch,- a trembler, full of agitation, afraid that whoever met him would slay him, although his brothers. He hardly needed to be told that the voice of his brother's blood cried to God from the ground. He felt that he was accursed of God, though protected from violent death. The consequence of sin is not merely the disordering operation of sin on the inner man and its wasting influence on the body, working independently of the will of God or man by virtue of its own tormenting power. One of its consequences is the wrath of God on the sinner, pressing him every day. He is cursed when he lies

down and when he rises up, when he sits in the house and when he walks in the way, and accursed in all the works of his hands and of his mind. A flaming sword turns every way to keep him from the tree of life. The ground is accursed for his sake, and he is driven out from his Heavenly Father's beautiful paradise. Mourning, lamentation, and woe fill the world.

The flood, the fire and brimstone that devoured Sodom and Gomorrah, the countless calamities visited upon man attest that the punishment of sin is not its mere natural working within the soul or on the body and the outward world. Positive punishment of sin is just as natural as any punishment at all; and the idea of a divine nemesis is universal to man, except where an artificial philosophy has perverted the spontaneous sentiments of the soul.

Even

The natural apprehension of the sinner is that he is shut out from mercy; for he knows that he deserves eternal punishment as truly as he deserves any punishment at all. Ill-desert, when once incurred, can never cease to be. George Eliot, in her Daniel Deronda, recognizes this. The degree of punishment incurred must of course depend on the degree of light in which the sin was committed. The state into which the sinner falls is a state of exposure to all the punishment which the wisdom and goodness of God must inflict, as well as the misery of that internal laceration which no will can control.

Mercy.

But it is plain that man was not doomed for his first sin, or for manifold sins, to eternal woe. In that case there would be no room for any gracious interposition. Of course, if the sin continued the curse remained, yet so that God, to gain if possible the sinner, made his sun to shine on him and his rain to descend for his benefit. A merciful promise was given to our first parents; Cain was spared; the longsuffering of God waited in the days of Noah; God bore long with the Amorites; he showed Pharaoh great mercy, and

was not ready to destroy him or his people till the last effort of graciousness was tried: the Canaanites would all have been spared if they had humbled themselves as the Gibeonites did, who needed no deceptive trick to secure grace from the God that made them.

All through the history of Israel and of the Gentiles, as they appear in the Bible, we find mercy alternating with judgment or intermingled with it. The threatenings of God, even when expressed without qualification, were found to mean that they would be executed unless there was repentance, as in the case of Nineveh. Jonah was right in his interpretation of the nature of God's comminations; and he was afraid he would lose his character as a prophet, because in case the Ninevites repented his denunciation would come to nought. God said to Jeremiah: "In what instant I shall speak concerning a nation and concerning a kingdom, to pluck up, to pull down, and to destroy it, if that nation against whom I have pronounced turn from their evil, I will repent of the evil that I thought to do unto them." In Ezekiel the principle is extended to the individual: "When I say unto a wicked man, Thou shalt surely die, if he turn from his sin,.. none of his sins which he hath committed shall be mentioned unto him."

Everything shows that man was not brought by the representative sin of Adam into a hopeless condition. But there were some forms of evil to which, in general, the race was to be subjected, as disease, decay, and animal death, and the train of bereavement and sorrow connected with theseevils such that, on account of the fear of them, men, till the hope of the gospel delivers them, are all their lifetime in bondage.

Prophecy, especially in the Apocalypse, speaks of the visible judgments on the nations under the reign of Christ, to whom his Father has committed all judgment, as quite as terrible as those inflicted on the old world. The imagery of the prophet of Patmos is fully as awful and impressive as that of the more ancient seers. The same may be said of

the language of our Lord himself. The judgments on the old world are represented in the New Testament as the punishment of the time of God's forbearance of the time when God relatively overlooked, winked at, the ill-desert of men. In a large degree the punishments of Old Testament times are the visible judgments exhibited on the theatre of history; for it was God's design to prepare thus a historical, matterof-fact proof of his moral reign over the nations of the earth. This would prepare mankind to appreciate the revelations respecting the retributions of the unseen world. These were not brought into the bold relief they present in the New Testament revelation, though they were by no means unknown to ancient Israel, and are spoken of in the Book of Daniel as plainly as in the apostolic writings.

Object of Judgments and Mercies.

When sin is perpetrated, it seems due to God's moral creatures that he should make manifest his views on the subject, demonstrate his abhorrence of the sinner, and counteract as far as possible his evil influence. Words are not enough for this end. Punishment seems the natural and necessary resort of him who is the moral Guardian of the universe. It plainly must be pushed to such an extent as to be an emphatic expression of the mind of God, to show that to him sin is an evil and bitter thing indeed. Hence the awful severity of God's punishments, often fitted to make the ears of all that heard of them tingle, and their hearts fail them for fear.

Prophetic records, whether in form denunciatory or historical, are adapted to produce that quailing of the soul that the prophets themselves mention as the natural effect of the judgments of God on evil-doers. And yet we are not to think of them as a full execution of retributive justice. They might have been, with no exceeding of the ill-desert of the sinner, pushed much farther. But they were pushed as far as infinite wisdom saw good for the best effect. What is the full ill-desert of sin is known only to God; and we know

not that sin is ever punished in any world as much as it deserves to be. Objective penal justice is not an end; and God will urge its infliction no farther than benevolence requires.

If towards sinners God had appeared in no other light than that of a punisher, though not in any instance putting forth all his wrath, there might have been a sadly false impression made respecting his character; it might have seemed unamiably stern. It was wise, then, for God to manifest himself as a God of mercy-as forgiving iniquity, transgression, and sin. That grand revelation of his mercy to Moses appears in all his ways in the history of the world. Towards Israel and towards the Gentiles there was mercy, all along down the ages, ready for the penitent, sometimes unmingled with severities, at other times accompanied by such severities as served to keep alive a sense of God's hatred of sin, of his remembering wrath in mercy as truly as mercy in wrath.

How wonderful the discipline and training through which mankind were carried by the various dispensations, the antediluvian, the patriarchal, the legal, all tending to show how weak man is, and how much in need of the mightiest divine working in wisdom and love to rescue him from sin, to reconcile him to God, and to fit him to stand in the filial relation to his Heavenly Father. There doubtless was, as has been said, a moral necessity that God should give an emphatic expression, in act as well as word, to his sense of the evil of sin. Many hold that the law, both of nature and of revelation, contains a commination that must be executed, either on the sinner or a substitute. But no law ever did or could contemplate substitution in such a way that vicarious obedience and punishment should be regarded as a proper fulfilment of the precept and penalty of law.

Substitution is said to be resorted to sometimes in China; but this cannot be according to the provision of any law, but must be a contrivance of corrupt officials, substituting defenseless plebeians for rich criminals of rank. This view is sup