he does not refuse for himself either pain or shame. It may be that penitence is so far incomplete which would shrink back from any shame of suffering. But beware! his meekness under taunt, his acceptance of suffering, is now itself the expression of the man's growing self-identity of spirit with righteousness. Beware lest that which is righteousness in him be in you not only the most dastardly form of spiritual cruelty, but also the most awful outrage against truth :—while you dare to blaspheme, as the spirit of a liar, what you ought to be able to recognize, in awe, as the very light of the sovereignty of the spirit of truth! Yes, just in proportion as, in his self-surrender, he accepts shame as the penalty of lying, he is in fact further and further from having anything in him of a liar. He is more and more personally identical with the righteousness and truth to which every form of untruth is intolerable. Call him false? Why he is the very antithesis to falsehood The past act has no place, as falsehood, in the present self. As falsehood at least the past is literally and absolutely dead. So far as it lives, it lives only as the very opposite, -as consummated victory over falsehood.

We are trying to think, at this moment, not of an imperfect, but of a perfect penitence. A man has been in the depths, under the slavery of passion, or of drink. Imagine, if only for hypothesis' sake, not so much of penitence as you think you may probably hope for, but a penitence for once quite perfect. Think then of the clearness of his insight into the terribleness of that degradation which has become the very condition of his life, Think of the pain of the struggle against sin, and the anguish of shame because to abstain is so fierce a struggle and pain. He is impotent, even to anguish: and it is anguish of spirit to be impotent. Every step, every consciousness is a pain. Think of the pain of the disciplinary processes (which, even though pain, are his

hope, his strength, his joy!), the pain of the sorrow, the depth of the shame, the resoluteness of the self-accusing, self-condemning, self-identifying with the holiness outraged, the self-surrender to suffering and penalty, the more than willing acceptance, and development in the self of the processes of scourging and of dying. Though every step be shame and pain, he flinches not nor falters, for moment by moment, more and more, his whole soul loathes the sin and cleaves to the chastisement; he will bear the whole misery of the discipline of penitence, that, at all cost of agony, even within the dominion and power of sin, he may yet be absolutely one with the Spirit of Holiness, in unreserved condemnation and detestation of sin.

The transformation of the thorough penitent is marvellous indeed-even to thought. The personality which had revolted from righteousness, and identified itself with the will of sin, is now re-identified with righteousness in its condemnation of sin,-in its condemnation, therefore, of himself. Though others condone, he adjudges himself to shame. Self-disgraced, self-condemned, selfsentenced, he offers himself to voluntary punishment. He had outraged righteousness. But now, the true self is wholly ranged and identified, not with the revolting will, but with the righteousness, outraged, pleading, and condemning ;-at the conscious cost of all shame, all suffering, even death, to the self, because it is the self that has sinned.

It will be felt, of course, that all this is ideal? There is no penitence that reaches this? Yes, it is ideal. Such penitence our experience does not know. And yet after all we are only pointing to something, the process and the tendency of which we do know well. We may not think that, within our present experience, that tendency can ever reach its climax. But however incomplete it may remain within experience, the tendency at least

is unmistakably there. The past guilt can, and does, even in the case of such penitence as our experience has seen and known, have manifestly less and less of present reality in the man.

All penitence, no doubt, that we ever have known is imperfect. But to what does this innate, and progressive, tendency of even imperfect penitence bear witness? Does it not testify to the ideal, if unattained, possibility of a penitence so unreserved, so perfect, so Divine, as-not to constitute indeed a breach in personal self-identity, but to make a contrast of such vital moment between the past and present truth of the self, that the self would really be no longer identified with that with which it really was identified; that the dead past would, as present, really not be, or be only as the living antithesis to what it was?

It is to ideal penitence that our thought points. But it is ideal penitence that we desire to think of: for we desire to know what penitence really is,—not penitence as it is imperfect, but penitence as it is penitence: that is, to discern what penitence would be, if only it did ever reach the proper culmination of that which we do already know in process.

Need we ask whether, in the case of such a consummated penitence, it could still be right to inflict punishment on the penitent? We might well ask what sort of punishment could be inflicted? For, in one sense of that word, the penal discipline is even now, fully complete. And, in the other sense, it would now be a sacrilege to talk of penal vengeance.

Is it not true that such a penitence as we have tried to imagine would be itself, from end to end, truly suffering, truly penal? Is it not the case that the inmost secret of the meaning of that penal discipline would be found to be-not a remorseless infliction of external vengeance,

but the glory shining outwards from within, the glory -within the sphere and painfulness of evil-the glory of an inherently triumphant righteousness? And is it not therefore true that, in the presence of such a penitence in the spirit of one who had sinned, there would be in fact a change so profound, so essential, in the very nature of the self, as would be, in the sphere of divinely ideal truth, incompatible with vengeance,—because, through it, the past sin was already no part of the present at all; the present had, however wonderfully, come to be itself the supreme antithesis of the past?

I have wished to be able to touch a point of view from which, under circumstances not unimaginable, that sentence upon the past, as part of the self, which we might call the sentence of absolving love, would be no less also the sentence of absolute righteousness and divine truth; and I seem to myself to discern it not by imagining conditions wholly unrelated with experience, but by imagining rather a completed development of tendencies which, even within experience, I do recognize amongst the wonders of the penitent life.

In the light of these thoughts it is not too much to say that penitence, if only it were quite perfect, would mean something more like, at least, than we could, apart from experience of penitence, even conceive intellectually to be possible or thinkable, to a real undoing of the past; —a real killing out and eliminating of the past from the present "me." Penitence is really restorative. Its tendency is towards what might truly be called "redeeming" or "atoning." It would really mean in me, if only it could be consummated quite perfectly, a real re-identification with the Law and the Life of righteousness.

Unfortunately, a penitence such as this will be felt to be, after all, more ideal than actual; an imagination not a possibility. It is a reasonable imagination because

it is in accordance with-not against-what experience bears witness to; but it is none the less not a practical possibility. Nay-the more clearly I discern what would be the supreme reality of penitence, the more does my very insight compel me to recognize the inherent impossibility of its consummation.

That penitence-that transformation of moral character -should be possible at all, is a marvel, requiring to be accounted for. But a penitence so ideal, a change of character so absolute, as we have imagined, a severance from the past so complete, that the past would leave no scar, and have no place, of guilt or of power, in the present personality at all; if it is on the one hand an element, and a necessary element, in spiritual aspiration and belief, is, on the other hand, definitely beyond the limit of this world's completed experience. No one, in this life, having sinned, is ever altogether as if he had not.

And why is it inherently impossible? Just because the sin is already within the conscience: and the presence of sin in the conscience, if on one side it constitutes the need, and may incite to the desire, of penitence, on the other is itself a bar to the possibility of repenting. The sinfulness, being of the self, has blunted the self's capacity for entire hatred of sin, and has blunted it once for all. I can be frightened at my sin; I can cry out passionately against it. But not the tyranny only, or the terror, or the loathing, but also the love of it and the power of it are within me. The reality of sin in the self blunts the self's power of utter antithesis against sin. Just because it now is part of what I am, I cannot, even though I would, wholly detest it. It is I who chose and enjoyed the thing that was evil: and I, as long as I live, retain not the memory only but the capacity, the personal affinity, for the evil taste still; as the penitent drunkard or gambler is conscious in himself, as long as he lives, of the