ness.

We might say indeed much more than this. The sorrowing heart, as sorrowing, contains implicitly the whole mystery of penitence, which is the mystery of human personality, and its inherent possibility of divinely spiritual life. Sorrow of heart is the signal prerogative of man; and it marks his origin and his destiny, as, in real truth, divine.

Again, to keep still to phenomena which are familiar, we recognize that penitence, in proportion as it is penitent, must be an emotion of love. If penitence expresses itself in sorrow, the spring and the cause of penitent sorrow is love. And not the spring and cause only. Love does not only make the tears first to begin. But, all through, they are love. Love is their essence. Love is their character.

The first tear, and the last, is a sign, is an utterance, is an act, of love. "Behold a woman in the city which was a sinner, when she knew that Jesus sat at meat in the Pharisee's house, brought an alabaster box of ointment, and stood at His feet behind Him weeping, and began to wash His feet with her tears, and did wipe them with the hairs of her head, and kissed His feet, and anointed them with the ointment."1 What is the explanation? "For she loved much." The sorrow is no mere accompaniment: it is the form which such love must necessarily take. If penitence is sorrow, it is so far like the lover's sorrow; the lover who is in love with one whom he feels to be hopelessly far above him, perhaps in station, at least in goodness and love. It is not to him love and pain. But the love is the pain. And the pain, he would not for worlds be free from it; for it is the necessary condition, it is the evidence, under present conditions at least it is of the essence, of his love. An anodyne which would kill the pain, would benumb the love: slackened pain would be love's decaying: only living pain is living love. So 1 Luke vii. 37, 38.

penitent sorrow is a sorrow that is blended with, and proceeds out of, love: sorrow that is the sign, the act, the utterance, and the relief, of love. Sorrow has become love's instinct, love's necessity. It is love which itself is heartbroken because of its own outrage against love. Here too, it is not love and sorrow: but sorrow which can be recognized as love, love which, just because it still loves, cannot but be sorrow.

Again, we recognize sorrowing love, on another side, as itself a manifestation of vivifying belief. "Jesus, remember me when Thou comest in Thy kingdom." These are the words of grace in one who will bear, as long as this world lasts, the undying title of "the penitent thief." And nothing in his penitence appeals to our imagination with such extraordinary force as the limitless power of faith which it involves. In spite of conditions physically the most cogent and most crushing, out of the midst of the terrible realities of literal crucifixion, he can look up and see, in one who to the merely outward eye is but another criminal in his death agony, the LORD of death and of life. This is no dream dreamed softly in moments of ease. It is faith, without any help of outward sense, transcending and transforming the most appalling realities of outward sense. It is faith which sees at last, and (in spite of extremest disabilities) embraces as wholly real, the very thing which is most essential reality. It is a supreme triumph and marvel of belief. Belief, it may be said, should come before love for love implies a basis, first, of belief. Yes, in logic perhaps it does; but does it so always in life? Often perhaps it is love which draws, towards goodness and towards God, those who, till they love, hardly believe; and who now feel that they believe because they love.

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But after all, it is rather that we may not seem to have omitted them, that we glance now at these familiar aspects 1 Luke xxiii. 42.

of a deepening Penitence. These are full indeed of their own deathless interest. Yet these are not the lines of thought about penitence, which it most concerns our purpose at present to pursue. We want now to ask not so much of this or that aspect of penitence, however significant in itself, or however touching, as of the whole, and the meaning of the whole as whole. What we want to consider is the fullest import of the word μerávoua,-containing sorrow, love, faith, and whatever besides,—as a real changedness of the life and the mind: nor indeed of the life and mind only-or anything else which can be even abstractly detached and considered apart from the unifying self; as a real changedness, then, not only of life or mind, but of the very self that lives and wills.

In speaking of punishment we endeavoured to distinguish, as following naturally upon sin, two distinct trains of penal consequence; on the one hand the whole system of external punishment; on the other the whole history and process of inner anguish of soul. And we ended by asking for the acceptance of these two principles;-first that the whole content of the former is capable of being transferred, by dutiful acceptance, so as to become the mere material of the latter; that is, all incurred pain may be transfused into penitence; and secondly that except only just so far as it is in this way transfused, and ministers to, or reappears as, penitence, penal pain is of no moral value to the punished personality at all. Righteousness may indeed be vindicated in the mere fact that I am severely punished. But except just so far as my punishment becomes, in me, the expression and voluntary sacrifice of my penitence, it is not within me, but without, that righteousness is vindicated and becomes triumphant.

On the other hand just so far as my punishment does really become my penitence, so far does righteousness win in my punishment a fuller triumph; for so far is it true

that,—within my very self, as well as without,-punishment, translated into penitence, is in the highest sense, the victory of righteousness.

We are familiar with many, very varying, degrees of penitence; many of them indeed most real, but none wholly perfect. It is of considerable importance moreover for the truth of our conceptions about penitence that we should bear clearly in mind this fact, which as fact, is surely indisputable: the fact that we know every degree of penitence except that one which alone would realize the true meaning of the word. It is of course from experience that we are to judge. But much as experience teaches us about penitence, it is important to remember that all the penitence realized within our experience, is of necessity imperfect penitence. If then we desire to know not what imperfect penitence is by reason of its imperfectness: but what penitence, apart from its imperfectness, really would mean: we must be explicitly prepared not indeed to contradict but at least to transcend experience, and contemplate something which we have never seen.

Bearing in mind this truth,—which will become perhaps increasingly prominent,-we return to the thought that the penitent, just so far as his penitence is sincere, if he is, undeniably, himself the same man who sinned, yet, in a sense subordinate, but hardly less important, is really-is even essentially-different.

Consider our instinct,-an instinct with only too much of reasonable basis-of the indelibleness of the effect of sin. When a man has sinned, and knows that he has sinned; when the eyes of his spirit are opened, even in part yet really, to see sin as it is; the fatal misery is that the sin which he so sees has become a very integral part of himself. From an external plague, a suffering, a load, a debt, he might be delivered. How can he be delivered from that which he himself is?

A man is deeply in debt. Find him means to pay the debt off,—or pay it for him; and he will be free. A man is grievously ill. Treat the illness aright, find the proper means of cure; and he will be perfectly well. There is, we observe, no contradiction here, for in fact, in spite of the form of our common phrase, it never was the real "he" who was ill. Ill or well, it was, so far, the same unaltered "he." The sickness, or the recovery, were as such, external to the real self. He was externally affected by the sickness: he was externally affected by the recovery. But in sickness or in health it was the same "he."

But it is not so when in perverse will, he has accepted and identified himself with sin. Sin in him is more than a load to be borne, more than a debt to be discharged, more than a slavery to be annulled, more than a sickness to be healed: nor will any one of these metaphors, or the scenery which belongs to these metaphors, symbolize adequately the whole truth of his case. For in all these metaphors, suggestive though they be as far as they go, the essential self remains untouched. So far as these metaphors go, the man loaded or freed from load,-the man in hopeless debt or with the debt paid,—the man enslaved or redeemed from slavery,-the man in sickness or recovered from sickness,—is the same man. On either side of each proposition the quality of the subject is unchanged. But sin enters within. Sin affects and perverts the central subject, the essential self. Delivery therefore from accomplished sin must mean not only a change of the circumstances or settings or conditions of the central subject; but such essential alteration in the subject himself, that he himself shall both be what he is not, and shall not be what he really is.

It is necessary for our purpose to try and realize in thought what a real deliverance from sin would mean. The true consciousness of the awakened sinner is