was the wish to forgive. So likewise does the heavenly Father deal with us; He seeks to forgive; He yearns that our hearts and wills should be reconciled to the everlasting righteousness. We reject His proffered forgiveness; we do not care for reconciliation; and we are thereby, and not by some after-exercise of power, delivered over to the tormentors. Every unforgiven man and woman in this congregation is in the tormentor's hands now: at the mercy of himself or herself; at the mercy of the world and time; at the mercy of the changes and chances of this mortal life; at the mercy of an accusing conscience; at the mercy of the fears of death and hereafter, and all the spectres of the loveless heart. I say, "at their mercy," and alas! they have no mercy. There is a penalty for indebtedness, and these compose it. Who dare say, looking into his heart of heart, that hell is a figment of theology? And it must be so. Omnipotence itself can order it no other way. If we are made to be at one in will, and nature, and affection with God; if heaven lies in that union, in disunion is hell. As long as our debt is unremitted, as long as we are unreconciled to perfect love, we must be miserable. There is no escape from the alternative. We may have

to speak another day of the means of this remission. But meantime dwell upon this truth, that the hell against which men murmur as unjust and unloving is of their own choosing. For hell is to be in bondage to one's own unruly wills and affections; hell is to be unreconciled to a God of Righteousness.

K

SERMON XI.

THE FORGIVENESS OF SINS THe remissION OF A DEBT.

(JANUARY 23, 1870.)

"And He turned to the woman, and said unto Simon, Seest thou this woman? I entered into thine house, thou gavest me no water for my feet: but she hath washed my feet with tears, and wiped them with the hairs of her head. Thou gavest me no kiss; but this woman since the time I came in hath not ceased to kiss my feet. My head with oil thou didst not anoint: but this woman hath anointed my feet with ointment. Wherefore I say unto thee, Her sins, which are many, are forgiven; for she loved much: but to whom little is forgiven, the same loveth little. And He said unto her, Thy sins are forgiven. And they that sat at meat with Him began to say within themselves, Who is this that forgiveth sins also? And He said to the woman, Thy faith hath saved thee; go in peace.”—LUKE vii. 44—50.

THIS is the completion of the narrative which we began to consider last Sunday. The Saviour was sitting at meat in the house of Simon, a Pharisee, and while there a "woman in the city, which was a sinner," found her way to the couch on which He reclined, and letting the bitter tears which she was shedding fall upon His feet, dried

them with the long tresses of her hair, and anointed them with precious ointment which she had bought, as we are told, for that purpose. The Pharisee, His host, who had been already, we may well believe, perplexed as to the real claims of the new Teacher, saw new difficulties in arriving at a true estimate of Him. This man, he argued, professes to be a prophet from God. Yet, if He were a prophet, He would by His prophetic insight into men's hearts know that this woman who is weeping at His feet is a profligate. If He does know the truth about her, why, as a prophet and a witness for God's holiness, does He allow her to pollute Him by her presence, unreproved? He was a shrewd reasoner, this Pharisee. Nothing was wrong in his argument except his premisses. He was

only ignorant of the truth that the office of the true minister of God is not to repel the sinner, but to convert him; the office of the true physician, not to keep himself at a distance from disease, but to encounter and heal it. And then our Lord, who had the prophetic insight of men's hearts, but used it for more blessed purposes than the Pharisee could understand, as He had read the woman's heart with pity, now read the reasonings of the Pharisee with pity of another

kind, and spoke to him the parable on which we were dwelling last Sunday.

I may seem to have departed from the natural order of events in speaking first of the parable, and afterwards of the incident which led to its being narrated; but I think I am justified in doing so. The parable represents a large and universal truth, of which the history of this woman's conversion is but a single illustration. Until we understand what the remission of sin is that it is not the remission of a penalty, but the remission of a debt-we shall not be prepared rightly to understand the lesson of this woman's history.

There is a peculiar tenderness and quiet pathos in this narrative which have commended it to many even of those who have no taste for dogmatic religion. It is one of those incidents which, like the sickness and death of Lazarus, can be separated from the general Gospel narrative; little idylls, if the expression is allowable, of human sorrow and the aspirations which arise out of it. As I have before remarked, when speaking of the house of mourning at Bethany, we are admitted to ground on which men of all creeds may meet on equal terms, and be content to lay down humbly their weapons of controversy,