of God in Him." God is not reconciled to us by the suffering of Deity; there is no passage in the New Testament which says so. We are reconciled to God; and, from the first page of the New Testament to the last, the Gospel of reconciliation is the theme of the Master and the prophet and the apostle alike. God was in Christ reconciling the world unto Himself, not imputing unto us our trespasses. If ever there was a Gospel which just met the need that human experience most needs it is that Gospel of the Cross of Christ. Let those who have sinned sin no more. The death of Christ is not an excuse for human sin; nay, it is God's verdict upon it. The Eternal Righteousness spake in the suffering of the innocent when Jesus died on Calvary, but it means that you were set free, as free as the best of humankind, and the blackest sinner may become the brightest saint. "Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool." It would be impossible to exaggerate the moral value of that Gospel; and that cannot be untrue which has such moral results. There are some men who would remain bad all their lives if they were not assured of such an emancipation as this. You stand away from your sin, and between you and it is a great gulf fixed. Then begins the possibility of holiness; then, and not till then. That Gospel justifies itself by results; and said I not well in declaring that the Atonement is there, the whole of Christianity? It is its beginning and its end.

I appeal now to two orders of experience the first, that mentioned at the beginning-the man who sees no need for that Gospel in his own case. Have you

seen a need for it in anybody else's, now? If you feel that you are superior to it, that the Christ is dear to you without it, perhaps some day you will see for your own sake deep into the mystery, and find that you cannot do without the Crucified. But, whether that day ever comes or not, will you stand alongside the sinner now, and, in the sweet simplicity of the Master Himself, be prepared to affirm it for those who do need it?

"Doubtful, where I fain would rest,

Frailest where I seem the best,

Only strong for lack of test,

What am I that I should press
Special pleas of selfishness,
Coolly mounting into heaven,

On my neighbour unforgiven?"

"Let him that thinketh he standeth take heed lest he fall." We have not only to preach the Christ of the Resurrection morning, but the Christ who agonised on Calvary, and at that point we touch a mystery so great that it would take eternity to explain, and it is necessary for every soul of man born into the world.

The second order of experience-need I appeal to you? You are low down-get up! You feel in despair-there is no place for despair; for the Christ is Master of all moral records, as well as of the world of moral standards. You feel the remorse which comes from having lived a wrong life. Remorse is not repentance. Lay hold upon eternal life. There is a way for you into the highest, and that way lies past the Cross of Jesus Christ. Amen!

VII

THE MYSTERY OF PAIN

When thou passest through the waters, I will be with thee. -Isaiah xliii. 2.

Your sorrow shall be turned into joy.—John xvi. 20.

E

VERY generation has its own way of looking at the facts of life, and its own peculiar habits of thought. No man can absolutely escape the influence of the intellectual and spiritual climate of the times in which he lives, nor can he avoid asking the questions which the conditions of his time create, and which other men are asking also. There is probably no question more characteristic of our generation than that which we have styled the mystery of pain. In one sense it is a question that is very old; in another and larger sense it is a question that is absolutely new; it is as old as human sorrow, and it is as new as the experience of the youngest man. When we think of experience-the experience into which we are born, the experience we make for ourselves-we are sometimes inclined to aver that the question of the mystery of pain never was so intense as it is at the present hour, and certainly there is no question which is more characteristic of our own day and generation.

I will give some reasons why I believe the question is for us to-day so much larger than it has ever been in the history of the world. Within the memory of some

the problem did not exist, at any rate, in its intensity was not so present in fact to the minds of men, though it was always in a degree assumed in their experience and intercourse. For example, that gifted lady, Frances Power Cobbe, in her "Recollections," states that she can remember how unmercifully, when she was a child, both animals and children were flogged and variously ill-treated by those who had them in charge; not universally, but so generally that it never excited much surprise. We are aware, too, that such creations of Dickens as Mr. Squeers and Mr. Creakle could scarcely exist to-day; and such institutions as the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (to adhere to the same line of illustration) are comparatively modern. To our immediate forefathers the problem of pain, which is largely the result of human sympathy, did not exist in such a degree as it exists for us.

To go a few generations farther back. In the time when Puritanism was in its grandeur-and, if Lord Macaulay is to be believed, Puritanism produced the noblest type of character that has ever been produced in any country and in any age-we notice a certain grimness about the noblest of the men who represented it, say, in the seventeenth century, and, though less conspicuously, in the sixteenth, too. Going to Reformation days, the character of Sir Thomas More has variously been commented upon, Catholic though he were, for this reason, amongst others, but this one is always given, that he was a kind and affectionate father, who treated his children with tenderness more like that of a friend than of a parent. We sometimes speak about the good old times; well, there were times in this country when grandeur of character was per

haps more conspicuous than it is to-day, but it is perfectly certain that the sensitiveness and sympathy and perplexity in the presence of the problem of pain did not exist in previous ages of this country as they exist for our experience at the present hour.

When we go to other civilisations than our own, and especially those which have played a great part in the making of the civilisation in which we live-take, for example, that of ancient Greece, which is in some sense typical and in other sense unique-we find that the problem is present to the thinkers and poets who expressed the spontaneous feeling of the men of their days. But, while the Greek tragic poets could write eloquently about the question of pain and of human woe, which they attributed to the jealousy of the gods, we notice one very conspicuous difference between their way of looking at the question and the way in which we look at it to-day. For a statement of that difference I would refer you to the works of Dr. Martineau, who, in his "Hours of Thought," points out what I suppose we all know now-that between the civilisation of ancient Greece and that of to-day there is this difference, that in the one pity for the weak, oppressed, and unfortunate is largely absent, and in the other, with all its faults, these things do exist, and increasingly so. There were no hospitals in ancient Greece, no homes for the poor, no orphanages, no institutions for the lessening of human woe; there were no protests against war. I think that in the last war very largely the strength of what we, for want of a better name, have called the pro-Boer agitation in this country came from the Christian hatred of war in general. In ancient Greece that did not exist. With all