it may, not it must: and the sin may be prevented, yet not the sinner amended. A tiger chained is not a tiger tamed; yet the chain may serve us by limiting the effects of his ferocity, though it does not change his nature. The stroke may both deter a sinner from sins by fear, and disempower him from committing such wrongs as he still would not fear to do, had not his punishment deprived him of the ability. The stroke, again, may deliver and may vindicate many of the suffering and the oppressed. Punishment may serve those who have been aggrieved by the wrong-doer, by proving their case, answering their cry, and working for them full or partial remedy. The stroke, again, may establish and honour the rule of right. Law, read in the light of penalty, is read distinctly, and so read that the impressible heart is a prepared plate, and the lurid light photographs in us the inscription on which it glares. Men feel then, too, what they so oft forget, that the power is where the truth is. The stroke, too, may thus strike salutary fear into many who had not sinned, but were going on to sin. Thus, the effect of vengeance may be the destruction, repression, and prevention of wrong. The award to the wrong-doer is in kind according to his desert-not in every case and at once in degree-by his sin is he self-deprived of good, and suffering is selfderived unto him. And the award of a stroke is a good award, apart from its possible moral effect on the evildoer; good, as expressive of God's holy ardour against evil, and as a part of His work for its frustation and overthrow. And the good moral effect of punishment on the man, the effect upon his character as distinguishable from that upon his actions, is greatly due to his recognition that the vengeance was a right thing, whether or no he made a right use of it. Not only can punishment, as the subordinate vengeance of God, deter from evil actions, but it may become occasion of evil's relinquishment. But, for this, the penalty must be, as, thank God, it is, administered redemp. tively. The whole scheme of punishment is constituted relatively to the whole scheme of benevolent mediation. The storms of the law may drive men to the shelter of the gospel; the repulsions of fear drive them within range of the attractions of love; but then for this there must be a gospel, must be a supreme love; such a love, such a gospel, there is,

The great God loves his own justice, and must needs be inexorably against the wrongness of his creature; but not inexorably against his creature. The great God loves his creature, the work of his heart and hands; so capable of resembling him in character and joys, And He must needs take care, in his severest punishments, that this love be exercised unto the uttermost. The work of penal vengeance must be subservient to that of love; not, observe, consistent with it only, for vengeance is directed against the wrong of the creature, and that, however great, is finite; but the work of love expresses the excellency and infinitude of God's own proper being. He is love. And however grievous hell, and all that holds of hell, may be, and however mighty; in our final view of it, it shall be unto heaven, as the least possible outworking of Evil, to the greatest possible of Love. The

one is the work of the creature, the other that of the Creator; and how magnificently shall the Creator's love transcend and conquer the creature's fault! It must be thus. But, then, how actually can it be thus ? It is so by an Atonement, which is an Expression, with a correspondent Power; an expression of the Love which loves righteous. ness, yet loves men-a Power for the destroyal of sin, and of the need for full penal vengeance upon the sinful.

Are there not, we now ask, many cases in which even a man may be said rather to revenge himself against wrong than upon the wrongdoer? If an act mean or cruel has been done in the circle which he influences, he may or may not be able to deal penally with the transgressor; but if he is able, will not his anger at the sin lead him to take other earnest measures for the abatement of sins like that in the neighbourhood; and will he not seek to exhibit as impressively as possible the excellences most opposed to such sins? He is angered by a lie, and shows how indignantly he is opposed not to the liar only, but to Falsehood. And if his own character has been clouded by the breath of the calumniator, will he not best avenge himself if his light so shine as first to disperse the cloud, and then to reach him who puffed it forth, and who receiving blessing in requital of hurt, learns, by the light of magnanimity, at once how brief was the injury he could do, and how mean he was for attempting it.

In such ways has God revenged himself upon the world; he has abashed iniquity by exhibiting perfect and lustrous rectitude; he has shamed selfishness by self-sacrifice; he has confronted the world's disloyalty by Christ's fidelity; coward, self-indulgent man has he confounded with Christ's sublime earnestness. In the intensity of Christ's sufferings, and the dreadful battle in which he was engaged, God has expressed His awful moral ardour for right and against wrong. By the utter contrast of a Life simply and grandly good, to the general course of men's lives in this world so variously and disgracefully evil; and by the free offer of this Life to us as a Word of mercy pledged, and a Hand of mercy stretched out, God has at once avenged himself on the Sin of the world rather than on the world, and avenged himself on us by showing and doing that good in the most perfect way, to which we had become darkened, from which we had fallen. God revenges himself on Selfishness by Love. With evil he contrasts goodthat he may overcome evil by good. That man best triumphs over and revenges himself upon his enemies who makes them his friends. Such revenge does God seek, and shall He seek and not find? The essence of Sin is a Will that will be its own rule; a will not with God, not in God. Christ exhibits the uttermost reverse of selfishness in a Will ever subject to God though in pains, in an obedience only required, and indeed possible, in a world fallen into the vanity and anarchy of selfishness. Love alone can atone for selfishness: can atone the selfish. God so loved the world that he sent the Son of his Love into it armed with powers for subduing selfish man unto himself; and when Love subdues us to itself it is to impart to us its own plenitude, whereas when Evil subdues us it is to draw our life from us con

sumingly away. We yield to Good, and enter into a celestial marriage; we yield to Evil, and, like a spider or a serpent, it preys upon our vitals. Only the plenitude of wise divine love could fill up the dreary void which Selfwill had made, re-imparting to a world which hate had wintrified the summer warmth of life. In Christ, God was most worthily satisfied, for by him did He indeed conjointly express the Love of righteousness and the Love of man; so express them that on those who believe his reconciliative Love exerts Power to produce moral union with Him. He who believes takes the benefit of God's vengeance upon Sin, and ceases to be obnoxious to God's vengeance on himself. Without being treated according to his desert, he comes so to feel it as to avail himself of all Christ's power to effect holiness in him. God has so revenged himself on Sin, as to change the heart of the Sinner: what need now of penal vengeance upon him? In what way sufferings for his past sins may still attend the forgiven and reconciled man, and how we are to regard these, will afterwards be shown. How God's great avenging display of his own character in Christ's redeeming mercy involved Suffering truly vicarious, that of the just for the unjust, will also appear. And it will be seen, too, that no man can escape the penal vengeance of God except as blessed through that reconciliative Love which proclaims forgiveness of sins, and whose accompaniment and effect is an inwrought and substantial righteousness with its varied and abiding fruits.

LETTER VII.

FRIENDS, I spoke in the last letter of the government of Him whose Name is the Fearful and the Glorious, and spoke of it as one should who prefers to use of His Love the term-unspeakable. But magnify that Love as we will, the heart of mortals must sometimes tremble. Crucifixion is terrible, though resurrection is triumphant. Retribution is terrible, though the Song of Redemption is as the joy of Humanity, the mother, who remembers no more the Sorrows of Time, now that she sees the child God hath given her-Immortal Happiness. But let the Christian steadfastly believe that terror serves triumph; pain ministers to bliss; that punishment does homage to mercy; and that the maddest and wickedest free will of man or spirits evil, is as fast bound within Divine limits as are the surging waves of the sea. Even if God permits, as he oft has done, in the burned city and the bloody battle-field, his creature man to learn some primary lessons of justice and truth as by the light of hell-fire; it is because of the Heavenly worth of the lessons that he will have them so learnt if they can be learnt no otherwise.

They who were sent forth to preach God's Love were to begin at Jerusalem, yet before they were so sent, Jerusalem was doomed. The preaching was preached, and the doom was accomplished. Think what wild farewell' old Jerusalem took of the earth; think how the resounding strokes of the vengeance God wrought on her still vibrate on the air of history. He judged her for the murder of her King; yet forgave-on their repentance-even these that killed the Prince

of Life, for his dear sake. Though he took vengeance, he forgave; though he forgave, he took vengeance. For the manifestation to the evil-doer and to others of what evil is, for its repression in the world, and for the conduction of men into preparedness to receive the Atoner and to live by atoning truths, is vengeance, penal vengeance, needed. The time, the mode, the degree, God knoweth. Because the Redemptive is paramount, it is not implied that the Retributive is unnecessary. Though the Cross of Christ is mightier than the rod of the law, yet the rod is an active and a constant servant of the cross. By Christ's stripes are we healed, but a part of the healing is of that soreness and weakness which the stripes we ourselves have deserved and received may have brought upon us. In smiting the rebellious city, God smote sinners and he smote sin; but in that Act of Doom he smote sin less by Disheartening it through fear, than he did by breaking away in Jerusalem's destruction the great obstacle to the Mission of Forgiveness to man. He made a way for Love by taking out of the way by fiery wrath the obstinate and rebel city. Thus Love may be seeking and may find its triumph by the very overthrow that judgment works. And this triumph of love is in the restoration and enhancement of blessedness by the restoration and enhancement of character. But in the fact that penal vengeance and sufferings consequent on sin are needed at all in a world where there is a Redeemer mighty to bless men by turning them away from their iniquities, it is implied that the whole Providence of God is redemptive, that the Redeemer is such partly by directing their redemptive administration, that he carries on his work ever proceeding by his work once for all finished: that in punishing God is redeeming, that, in fact, his moderated penal vengeance and our sufferings on account of sin, are as necessary, in their own place, towards our redemption—that is, our being brought out of all evil and brought into all good, this is Redemption-as were Christ's suffer ings on our behalf, and God's avenging of himself against sin and us in that mighty work of love. What these truths further imply of God who saves and of the man who is being saved, I shall presently show. But meanwhile, let me observe, that the cases of suffering on account of sin are very complex. One such case may illustrate how the good suffer for the sake of the evil, in self-sacrifice; how the innocent suffer with the evil, by necessary involvement; how the consequence of one man's sin is made excessive through another man's sin; how the results of what is done with blame are aggra vated by what is done by error that is blameless; how what is retributive may be proportioned rather to the nature of the sin as such, and to its relative hurtfulness as compared with sin of another kind, than to the guilt of the particular action; how some of the results of Sin are unavoidably necessary, some contingent upon other action, and where the results are least mitigable, the guilt is not always most apparent. These things we say not to confuse the minds of the Scattered, but to impress upon them the scope God has for variety in his redemptive providence, and the scope he has given us for the rewarding study of that providence. But I wish

them chiefly to notice now how God's retributions have an aim beyond the particular offence, and the particular offender. It is sin in us as a Force, rather than sin on us as a stain or sore, that God considers; and sin as a power spreading injury through a world of necessarily related individuals, rather than sin as confined in its effects to the sinner, with which he deals. It is sin as the bent of the heart having the tendency and the power totally to estrange us and the earth from rectitude, and therefore totally to disinherit us and the earth of blessedness against which he directs the measures of his allied Mercy and Vengeance. Consequently, some of his direct retributions may be rather expressive of his utter hatred of evil and ardent action against it, than a measure of the present guilt of men and of communities. The last issue of sin on souls is to make them fit only for utter and irreversible exclusion from God's kingdom in Christ, unchecked sin tending to the perfect worst in wretchedness because to the perfect worst in character. But if the Penal is also the preventive; if the Just God is in his sternest rule of the earth ever also the Saviour; then in what we have said of the subordination of the retributive to the redemptive, such that this is itself a part of the Redemptive, it is implied, That God will often express his displeasure to us as by an angry look or an upraised finger, threatening to punish in order that he need not; That when his strokes come they may be now lighter than our individual guilt, and now heavier; That his penal vengeance may often be made prominent in the course of the earth's story, that He may secure the least possible suffering, and that of the fewest possible persons at the end; and That by postponement of full vengeance he provides its complete justification when at last it falls on those who might have avoided it. These are some of the things that must be true of God the Redeeming Avenger. And they are, as thus expressed, but mustard seeds of spiritual thought, which must be hidden awhile in the ground of meditation, that plants largely and fruitfully expansile may proceed from them.

But what such a redemptive government implies of the saved man must now be shown. Is it asked how far he is relieved of the consequences of his past sins? He is relieved of the main spiritual consequence as soon as he repents and believes; for he, the changed man, is not now under the wrath but in the love of God; not now aside from God, not opposed to God, but in God by union with his will, and with God in dependent work. His past demerits cannot become unreal as facts. But God, though he hated the man's actions, was not angry with the actions, but with the man because of his actions, and the man is changed! Christ has availed to produce the sense of demerit, but to change the spirit of demerit. And now the effect of these former actions is reversed, for whereas before the change they could but be stimuli for further misdoing, they now excite to effort against that evil life of which they were particular effects. The penitent, believing man has an avenging zeal in respect of his past