hostile to men on account of sin, is to emasculate and degrade our conception of Him. He is not a mere "good-natured" God. His righteousness as well as His love is infinite.

Take a case:-You have a child who is the light and joy of your home; her voice is sweeter to you than any music, and her face is fairer and brighter than a summer's morning. Her thoughts are as pure as mountain air; her life is as stainless as mountain snow. She is on the threshold of womanhood, and the very flower and perfection of her loveliness and beauty have come. And a wretch, whose crime human language has no terms black enough to describe, and human laws no punishment terrible enough to avenge-deliberately, by hypocrisy, by lying, by a deep - laid scheme, worked out with elaborate cruelty-betrays her trust, ruins her virtue, and then flings her from him on to the streets of a strange city. He has no compunction for his crime. If the opportunity comes to him again he will repeat it. Tell me now-What ought to be God's relation to such a man as that? Ought God to be at peace with him? God forbid! If He were, there would be no justice in the universe. My hope and strength and consolation in the presence of such a crime as this, come from the certainty that wherever that man goes, under whatever disguises he may live, whatever his wealth may be, whatever his rank, he is pursued by One who is the relentless enemy of his sin-and who will be his relentless enemy if he will not renounce his sin-an

enemy from whose grasp he cannot escape, whose strength he cannot resist, and whose justice and wrath, if he does not repent, will inflict upon him an awful penalty. Even to the worst of men indeed God manifests patience and longsuffering. The Divine mercy clings to them while there is any hope, and endeavours to redeem them. It is better, infinitely better, that they should repent than that they should suffer. But the Divine hostility becomes more intense as the Divine grace is resisted, and if they refuse to repent they are treasuring up unto themselves. "wrath against the day of wrath, and revelation of the righteous judgment of God."

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An extreme case does but illustrate the real nature of the sin that is in all of us, and of God's antagonism to it. The sin may not be developed in a gross form; may not be of a kind to startle our own conscience; it may not bring upon us the strong condemnation of other men; but God cannot endure sin in any form. In the vast and awful conflict between righteousness and sin, which gives tragic interest to the history of the universe, God is irrevocably on the side of righteousness, and on the side of those who are striving to be righteous. But for the transcendent work of mercy consummated by Christ on Calvary, God would be not only hostile to sin, but hostile to those who take sides with sin, from the first moment of their revolt against the eternal law of righteousness. For sin is a personal act; it has no existence apart from the sinner.

But it was one of the chief elements of the apostolic

gospel that in and through Christ God is ready to be at peace with us. In a very true sense He is at peace. with us already. His hostility to our sins has received adequate expression in the Death of Christ, and now He is ready to confer on us the Remission of sins for Christ's sake. The Remission of sins is something more than "a kind of formality." It brings to the man who has received it a sure and permanent escape from the hostility and the wrath of God.

To reassert the austere truths on which I have felt it my duty to insist in this Lecture, and in speaking of which I have, perhaps, lost the calmness of the lecturer in the vehemence of the preacher, is one of the most urgent duties of these times. Until they are restored to their original place in the thought and faith of the Church, the Death of Christ, as an Atonement for the sins of the world, will never awaken in our hearts the wonder and awe and passionate gratitude with which it filled the hearts of saints in former centuries; our theory of the Atonement will be impoverished, and what remains of it will rest on no sure and firm foundation. While these truths are relegated to obscurity and silence, even if they are not consciously and avowedly rejected, we shall not be likely to have much success in preaching the gospel.

It is of no avail for us to plead that we have an invincible reluctance to speak of them, and that they are too awful for contemplation, even in our silent and solitary thought. We are under the most solemn

obligation to receive ourselves, and to make known to others, whatever God has revealed concerning the condition and destiny of our race. To refuse to consider the terrible penalties which menace those who have not received the remission of sins, will lessen the urgency of our solicitude for their eternal redemption; and if we fail to warn them that while they persist in their impenitence and unbelief they are exposed to "indignation and wrath, tribulation and anguish," we cannot clear ourselves of responsibility for their eternal perdition.

Nor is it of any avail to plead that to tell men they have provoked the Divine hostility and the Divine wrath, is likely to repel them from Christ, rather than to attract them to Him. We are bound to tell them the real facts- concealing nothing, alleviating nothing. Christ Himself is responsible for the revelation He has made to our race. To improve upon it, to suppress what we think is likely to provoke resentment; to insist incessantly on what we think is likely to conciliate, is no part of our duty. It is for us to "use great plainness of speech," "not walking in craftiness, nor handling the word of God deceitfully."

I, too, believe that the great function of the Church is to make known the infinite love of God as revealed through Christ, and the greatness and glory of the Christian salvation. But Christ did not come to tell men that they had incurred no guilt by their revolt against God's authority, or that their guilt exposed

them to no penal sufferings in the world to come, or that in this world God regarded them with no anger. If the guilt had not been great, the Remission of sins which He died to obtain for us would have been an inconsiderable blessing; if the penalties which He professed to avert were unreal, there would be no reason for being grateful to Him for deliverance from them; if there had been no righteous anger in the heart of God, the propitiation which He made for the sins of the world has no significance or value. One of the chief reasons why men do not trust in Christ to save them, is that they do not believe that there is anything from which they need to be saved.

Nor is it of any avail to plead that if men can be made conscious of sin, and of their need of redemption from sin, it is unnecessary to provoke their antagonism by speaking of the terrors which threaten the impenitent. Antagonism! Is it true that impenitence justly deserves God's anger and hostility, and will be justly punished with the pains of the second death? If it is, then this antagonism involves guilt; it arises from an inadequate apprehension of the evil of sin; so long as it continues there is revolt against the eternal Law of Righteousness; latent revolt-if through suppression of the truth concerning the Divine hostility and wrath, and the future penalties of sin, the antagonism is not provoked; active revolt—if the truth produces resentment, and is rejected as inconsistent with the character of God.

If it is true that a sinful man needs the Remission of