observation, for that would be to condemn the gospel which authorizes and recommends it.

IL-REPENTANCE.

Repentance is literally the returning of the soul to itself, in order to punish itself for a fault committed; it is a penalty, a chastisement, that it internally inflicts upon itself; it is the natural rebound, the reaction from sin, in a conscience that retains the feeling of its duties and its destination.

It is a great relief to the soul to be freed from the opinion of its own merit. It gains great power from having no dependence on its power, and yet being able to promise itself the victory.

The noblest, and when once he comes to feel it distinctly, the deepest and most imperious of the wants of man, is that of satisfying the moral law, that law which is God himself manifested to the conscience, that law which, on the other hand, is only absolute for the soul in so much as it finds God therein. We may indeed affirm that the satisfaction of this law is the want of all, and that this want has its own time and place in every life whatever; but even were it confined to a choice section of the human race, that section would be constrained to demand its satisfaction. Now this satisfaction is refused to man upon earth; he neither sees it consummated in himself or around him; and it would be in vain that he should seek to persuade himself

that a universal disorder might pass for order, and that, perhaps, from a point of view high above the reach of human vision, this disorder might become order. Such answers would appear to him mere irony; would but perplex him into irritation. The obstacle remains intact, and life wears itself away against a problem which is never removed.

And because the sentiment of moral obligation carries with it that of responsibility, because the sense of having infringed the law, or even of not having accomplished it, hollows out in the soul an abyss that we may indeed disguise, but never fill; another want arises within us, the want of a reparation of some kind. I say designedly reparation, I do not say pardon; conscience cannot ask from another a pardon it refuses to itself; and even were the pardon of the legislator announced-I mean a pure and simple pardon-conscience would not believe in it, rest on it, nor ratify it. Necessarily implacable towards itself, it would continue internally to avenge the law which renounced its own vengeance. It can only be satisfied when reconciled with itself; it cannot satisfy itself at the expense of the law; all that wounds the law attacks conscience itself, for conscience is the law individualized; and hence exists the indispensable necessity that all rehabilitation offered to it should include reparation for the disorder of which it feels itself at once the accomplice and the victim.

Victim! doubtless conscience is this; but it is

because it is not sufficiently so, because it is inadequate to the sacrifice, because all the reparation it can offer or accomplish exhausts its strength without exhausting its guilt,-it is for this reason that its torment increases. And as this torment increases in proportion as the soul becomes higher; as it is keenest in the most innocent lives, we cannot help seeing in this avowal of the best natures an implicit confession of the whole human race panting beneath the burden of its own reprobation. And yet what would be the use to us of a reparation purely vindictive? Let us suppose that it might be paid with another price than our own selves, and that the means of our absolution did not deprive us of the means of profiting from it; that we ourselves were not to be the holocaust of our sin; of what avail were it, that by some means or other in us, or outside of us, reparation should be made, if this reparation were purely negative, effacing the evil but not creating the good, if it did not re-establish within us the law that it avenged outside of us, if it failed to bind our life to that law by our own heart's consent, if it did not cause to triumph in us obedience in liberty, and liberty in obedience, beneath the auspices and the mediation of love?

The solution of these questions includes that of all others; the satisfaction of these wants assures that of all wants besides; while other questions solved, other needs supplied leave a great void in the soul, and so long as it has not learned and

received what we have just been laying down, it seems as though it had received nothing, learned nothing.

True religion, in its origin, can only be a blessed encounter between pardon and repentance. It is to other hours, brighter hours, that belongs the free and full impulse of an emotion which the memories of sin and the consciousness of God's justice crush back austerely in a heart where pardon has as yet been neither appropriated nor enjoyed. The dawn of the blessed day is a severe, cold, and even stormy dawn. In some fear, in others shame, confusion, bitterness of remorse-in all, a feeling very different from free and joyous love-constitute the crisis, the decisive moment of the moral cure. And because conscience is the culminating point, as well as the most fertilizing principle of the moral being, therefore it is given, to it alone, to circumscribe and surround the whole man. Through a humbled conscience you will infallibly reach the heart, and easily the intelligence and the imagination; whereas by none of these faculties will you certainly get at the conscience. It would be useless, after so many expe- . riences, to demonstrate that our natural sensibility, however exalted it be, does not resolve itself into obedience till our soul has been convinced of its state of sin and condemnation. And as for the thoughts of reason and imagination, how many years, how many ages, they may exercise our intellect, threading all its intricacies without ever by

their own force attaining to the delicate, irritable bleeding point where groans the sovereign of the moral being, the interpreter and organ of the thrice holy God! The history of the human mind sufficiently tells us this. Never has philosophy given birth to a religion; and as for poetry, even allowing her to have done more than embellish already existing creeds, what has she ever produced under the name of religion but poetry still?—whereas, conscience once awakened, wakens the whole man; conscience cured, cures the whole man; its peace is shed abroad in the heart; the heart delivered from its troubles, set free from its chains, springs freely forward to its first, its true object; reason rises to a point of view whence everything appears to it harmonious and coherent; imagination replaces vain dreams by magnificent hopes, hopes certain as though they were not immense, immense as though not certain, and by the most marvellous alliance between the real and the ideal. I do not mean to say that the lever of conscience moves this universe in every man alike; in many its development remains incomplete, limited by ill-founded fears, by imperious traditions, or precedent; but at least the heart is gained over to love, and is not love the accomplishment of the human destiny? Is not love the whole of life?

The law may be satisfied in two ways: by its fulfilment when this takes place; and by the suffering of the responsible agent when the fulfilment has