has lent itself to some Satan promising it "all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them." Within his special range, we may freely own the title of the man of genius to be a law to himself and us, seeing that there our admitted rules are not large enough to cover the whole compass and achievements of his faculty. But this, far from being a negation of law or a personal immunity from it, simply identifies him with its higher revelation, and only says that he will be judged by a standard severer and sublimer than our own; that he has the glorious bondage laid upon him of a perfection beyond the limits of others' vision. It means, not that he may set the heel of contempt on the sanctity of known right, but that with the feet of a winged ascension he is to bear it into loftier altitudes, whence it will command a wider horizon and more effectually see that all is harmonious and good.

Faculty then, in all its varieties, comes to us as a fiduciary deposit, opening, no doubt, new provinces to the will, but concurrently enlarging the scope of duty.) That "of him to whom much is committed much will be required" is the rule of heaven: that he may do as he likes, since power exempts from obligation, is justly represented as the rule of hell. Whoever follows it exiles himself from the sacred territory of the world, and goes over, with his proud gifts, to the outer darkness. For in this ordered universe there is no exception, even at the supreme height, to the acknowledgment of law, no breaking of bounds into

wild uncertainty. The Lord of all, the very God of our worship, is not raised by his almightiness above With a boundless free

the range of inviolate order. dom of possibility, he yet unswerving lines, and keeps the track with an eternal

commits his energy to

patience. (Are our problems so complicated, our pre

rogatives so lordly, that we must take liberties with the law of which he is the everlasting Keeper? What household sway so vast and various as his, who claims the Fatherhood of all? What administration so farreaching, what empire so stately as his, who presides over the universe and is charged with all the worlds? What intellectual realm so absolute as his, who in himself is the truth of all thought, the meaning of all beauty, the essence of all good, and for us is the fountain of genius and inspirer of conscience? Yet he works out his wondrous designs in the orbits of a perfect faithfulness: he identifies his will with the inherent supremacy of Righteousness; and the freedom of his infinitude he quits at countless centres for the relative life of love and holiness. To him let us but cleave in all our strife; and the Tempter will flee; the wilderness will be desolate no more; angels will come and minister unto us: and when we pass thence to the ministry of life, be it to the glory of a transfiguration, the sorrows of a Gethsemane, or the sacrifice of the cross, the tranquillizing peace of God will never be far from us.

VOL. II.

E

IV.

The limits of Divine and Human Forgiveness.

us.

MATTHEW vi. 11.

"Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive them that trespass against

STRANGELY enough, this prayer is daily uttered by those who deny that God can forgive us as we forgive one another; and who say that he requires a penal satisfaction which we never dream of making a condition of our forbearing mercy. The words have no meaning, if the Divine clemency and the human be not the same attribute, correspondingly exercised under corresponding conditions; not free and facile in the lower nature, and bound under difficulties in the higher. The parallel movement of God's absolving Pity and our own would be no object of prayer, would be wrong or impossible,-were not the moral essence and elements of both minds and of all minds the same. Pardon above answers, it appears, to pardon below. And if pardon be thus homogeneous in the two spheres, then penalty; if penalty, then sin; if sin, then goodAll the lights and shades of the finite conscience

ness.

are but reflections of the infinite holiness; and the pure and good and true on earth is pure and good and true in heaven. There is one righteousness, ever consistent with itself, for the whole universe; vindicating the same law, present with the same sanctity, wherever there is a Will free to obey, on the theatre of angels and in the nursery of the child,—in the secret selfdenials of private life, and in the open redemption of the world. This unity of God's moral government, which includes all souls in one undivided realm, and gives them free passports through all time and place, is the key and safeguard of the genuine gospel. Did men hold fast by this essential truth, they could never feign for God a character they would repudiate for themselves; or suppose a heavenly economy unlike every type of beauty and rectitude revered in their human world; or feel it allowable, in rising to the supernatural, to emerge into the unnatural, and confound the monstrous with the Divine. This truth will perhaps keep us from going wrong, when we endeavour to determine the Christian doctrine of forgiveness. For, if the Lord's Prayer itself links together human and Divine forgiveness, and presents them as of the same type, we have only to consult the witness of our own conscience in order to interpret the Eternal Mercy.

Imperfectly as the Christian ideal has approached to realization, the forgiving temper has won an established

place among the objects of our moral admiration. Contradicted though it be by the "Laws of honour,' and violated by the thousand jealousies and slanders of private life, it yet commands, when it appears in modern times, a respect quite foreign to the sentiments of the ancient world. To forego resentment is felt to be nobler than to indulge it, provided your forbearance really arises from your being not beneath insult but above it; not from indifference and pusillanimity, but from repose on the inner force of right, and faith in the returning balance of conscience when undisturbed by human anger and left alone with God. Perhaps, however, this just estimate would win a more triumphant way, if it were relieved of certain false claims upon it which continually drive it to recoil; and were set clear, with its own responsibilities, of all corrupting caricatures that assume its guise.

Observe then the class of evil doings which are described as the proper objects of our forgiveness. They are "trespasses against us; wrongs which we have ourselves sustained. In these cases, it is felt, the mere law of nature gives us advantage over the offender, which we may press upon him without injustice if we choose. As victims of his injury, we acquire certain rights over him, which he cannot complain if we employ. If we insist on an apology, if we look for reparation, if we demand his punishment, we shall not transgress the limits of equity, and shall be sup