THE FORGIVENESS OF SINS: THE

---

           
 

---

         

WE considered in the last lecture the action of the Holy Spirit in the Christian society. We saw that we can without dissembling any of the sad facts of life, the divisions, the crimes, the narrownesses of Christians, yet profess our faith in the real existence of a Church One, Holy, and Catholic; and that the belief is fitted to bring to us thoughts of peace and strength in the course of work which is often clouded by disappointments. We saw that we can, without presuming to define the life of heaven or measure spiritual forces by the conditions of earth, yet profess our faith in the present energy of a Communion of Saints; and that the belief is fitted to bring home to us the manifold powers of divine sympathy when we are distressed by the necessary isolation of much human effort. We have now to notice what our Creed teaches us of the action of the Holy Spirit upon the individual believer: how the Spirit on the one side sanctifies him and so makes     W. H. F.                                                                  9

X.

---

130                   The mystery of forgiveness.

X.

him able to behold God; and on the other side how the believer perfectly preserves even in that most awful Presence the fulness of his personal being, body soul and spirit.      I believe, we say, in the forgiveness of sins . I believe in the resurrection of the body . Here again no less than in our belief in the Church we rise above experience, above sight. We affirm that which nature cannot justify and which still the soul importunately craves after. And in each affirmation we appeal tacitly to the facts of the Lord's Life in confirmation of our faith. The Passion of Christ is for us the seal of forgive- ness. The Resurrection of Christ is the pledge of our resurrection.      I believe in the forgiveness of sins . Nothing superficially seems simpler or easier than forgive- ness. Nothing if we look deeply is more mys- terious or more difficult. With men perhaps forgiveness is impossible. For forgiveness is not the careless indifference to wrong by which we seek impunity for our own faults while we lightly regard the faults of others. It is not the com- placent bounty of a superior who has a proud satisfaction in giving to others release from small debts. It is not the perfunctory remission of a present penalty which leaves behind unremoved the sense and the contagion of evil. True

---

No forgiveness in Nature.                          131

forgiveness involves two things, a perfect knowledge of the offence, and a perfect restoration of love. In this sense we believe in the forgiveness of sins. 'That which is impossible with men is possible with God'. God knows, as men cannot know, the nature of sin; and still He offers Himself to us. What that knowledge is, what that love is, is shadowed out for us in the fact that He sent His only Son to be the Saviour of the world: He sent His Son to die that we might live.      Nature, I said, knows no forgiveness. With her there is no return of opportunity, no oblite- ration of the past. The deed done remains while the world lasts. The deed left undone is a blank for ever. There is no exaggeration in the startling thought of a recent writer that it would be pos- sible with powers not different in kind from our own to read backwards in the succession of physi- cal changes the history of our earth, to hear again the last cry of the murdered slave cast into the sea and to look again on the last ripple of the water that closed over him. Each act of man obviously goes on working, and working after its kind, in the doer and in his children's children. So it is also with thought and with feeling. The bad thought once admitted avenges itself by rising again unbidden and un- welcome. The bad feeling once indulged in                                                          9—2

X.

---

132                 The Gospel a message of forgiveness.

X.  Matt ix. 6. Apoc. vii. 14.

spreads through the whole character and gives birth to other like passions. Sin in every form is the violation of law, and law inexorably requires its penalty to the uttermost. We need not discuss whether the penalty is retributive or reformatory: it is in the nature of things that it must be paid. That is enough for us. To reason, if we are honest with ourselves, the great mystery of the future is not punishment but forgiveness.      This being so we can understand how the for- giveness of sins was the essential message of the Gospel. The work of Christ which first shewed, as men could see, the nature and the issue of sin shewed also the efficacy and the universality of the divine love. In Christ there was unclouded vision of men's infirmities and unfailing sympathy with men. The Son of man —because He was Son of man— had power on earth to forgive sins . In His own Person He fulfilled the will of God. In His own Person He fulfilled the destiny of man. And whosoever is in Him shares the virtue of His Life. By such a union the evil of the past is done away, and the crowning miracle of finite existence is accom- plished. By such a union there is true forgiveness of sins. And St John, as if to emphasise the mystery, describes it under a paradox: the redeemed, he says, washed their robes and made

---

The blood of Christ.                          133

them white in the blood of the Lamb—made them white in blood.      We weary ourselves vainly in endeavouring to shape these truths into a system. We have no faculties for such speculations. It is enough for us to rest in the language of the apostles. The blood of Christ—the life of Christ that was wholly rendered, sacrificed to God, that so it might be available for others—is the means of our forgive- ness, of our access to God: repentance and faith are the conditions of that fellowship with Him whereby His sacrifice is effectual for each believer. For, as we have just seen, we must be one with Him—His life must be our life—before His work avails for us. And so it is that 'the remission of sins' has always been connected with Baptism, the sacrament of incorporation. ' We acknowledge one Baptism for the remission of sins' that so the realisation of the atonement may be must vividly connected with the entrance on a new being. And here there is nothing unreal: nothing inconsistent with the purest images which we can form of the justice and holiness of God: nothing which is not confirmed by the experi- ence of the human soul as it strives to for- give. The penalty of wrong must be borne; and we are so constituted that we can take another's burden and communicate to him of the

X.

---

134                   Belief in forgiveness completed by

X.  Matt. viii. 7. Col. i. 20.

fulness of our strength. We can even see in some degree how this outflow of regenerating love trans- forms the consequences of the past. Such teachings of life are the vantage-ground of faith, and all these faint shadows of an energy in us, partial, isolated, limited, find their substance in Christ, Who took upon Him humanity, Who took our in- firmities and bare our sicknesses , and by bearing removed them, Who gave new life to the sinner by uniting him to Himself, Who made peace by the blood of His cross, and reconciled all things to God.      Looking then to that perfect life of the Son of Man, looking to His voluntary endurance of the consequences of sin, being Himself free from all sin, looking to His absolute communion with the Father through life and through death, looking to His love which calls out love, to His word which proclaims rest, we can, in spite of the sternest examples of natural retribution, which cover the whole field of the world, declare our faith in the forgiveness of sins .      'So I saw in my dream,' to quote the familiar words of our great English allegory, 'that just as 'Christian came up with the Cross, his burden 'loosed from off his shoulders, and fell from off his 'back and began to tumble, and so continued to 'do, till it came to the mouth of the sepulchre, 'where it fell in, and I saw it no more.' But

---

belief in the Resurrection.                       135

when we reflect upon what this forgiveness means: when we consider how profoundly character is in- fluenced by imperfections of nature, by the results of earlier conflicts and defeats, how the man whom we know is identified in part by scars in soul and body, we may ask how he, the friend of our human affection, will survive this glorious change when it is consummated in heaven. Therefore in regard- ing the future we complete our confession and say: I believe in the resurrection of the body , or, as it is in the original without variation, the resurrection of the flesh . I believe, that is, that all that belongs to the essence of my person, manifested at present in weakness, marred by the results of many failures, limited by the circumstances of earth, will remain through a change which the imagination cannot realise. I believe that the conflict between the spirit and the flesh which saddens the chequered course of life and adds fresh burdens to memory will not continue for ever. I believe that body soul and spirit, the manifold powers by which I act and feel and think and hold com- munion with the unseen here in a condition of humiliation, will be preserved entire in the day of the Lord and find a new expression in a condition of glory. I believe that even if depths of life be then opened into which my life will pass, and truths of fellowship be revealed which will

X.

---

136                         The idea of 'flesh.’

X.

outweigh without destroying all sense of separate existence, I—I who have laboured and loved, I who have striven to know the world and man and God —shall not be lost, but find the fruit and the meaning of my toil in that living unity to which I shall contribute.      I believe in the resurrection of the flesh . But in shaping for ourselves this belief we need to use more than common care lest we allow gross, earthly, thoughts to intrude into a realm where they have no place. The 'flesh' of which we speak as destined to a resurrection is not that material substance which we can see and handle, measured by properties of sense. It represents, as far as we now see, ourselves in our actual weakness, but essentially ourselves. We in our whole being, this is our belief, shall rise again. And we are not these changing bodies which we bear. They alter, as we know, with every step we take and every breath we draw. We make them, if I may so speak, make them naturally, necessarily, under the laws of our present existence. They are to ourselves, to use a bold figure, as the spoken word to the thought, the expression of the invisible.               For of the soul the body form doth take,               For soul is form and doth the body make. When therefore the laws of our existence are

---

The body a 'seed.’                                137

hereafter modified, then we, because we are un- changed, shall find some other expression, truly the 'same' in relation to that new order, because it is not the same as that to which it corresponds in this.      All imagery fails in some part or other to present a truth like this. But we should have been spared many sad perplexities, many grievous misrepresentations, if we had clung to St Paul's figure of the seed in looking to our future resur- rection. We sow not, he tells us, that body which shall be . There is then no question here of the regathering of material particles, no encourage- ment for unsatisfying appeals to God's omnipo- tence. What St Paul teaches us to expect is the manifestation of a power of life according to law under new conditions. God giveth to every seed a body of its own : not arbitrarily but according to His most righteous will. The seed determines what the plant shall be but it does not contain the plant. The golden ears with which we trust again to see the fields waving are not the bare grains which were committed to the earth. The reconstruction of the seed when the season has come round would not give us the flower or the fruit for which we hope. Nay rather the seed dies, is dissolved, that the life may clothe itself in a nobler form. True it is that we cannot in

X. 1 Cor. xv. 37 ff.

---

138                         The new rises out of the old.

X.

this way escape from a physical continuity; but it is a continuity of life and not of simple recon- struction. And St Paul warns us that the change which we cannot follow is greater than the changes of earth which we can follow: that the development of life goes on: that the manifestation of life takes place, as I said, under new conditions. Everything, he tells us, which characterises a material body, the flower no less than the seed, shall then cease to be. The unbroken continuity shall enter into a new sphere, unaffected by the limitations through which earthly bodies are what they are. It is sown in corruption: it is raised in incorruption. It is sown in dishonour : it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness : it is raised in power. It is sown a natural body : it is raised a spiritual body.      Such a faith as this, even in its necessary vagueness, is sufficient 'to fill the heart of man. It substitutes for the monotony of continuance the vision of existence infinitely ennobled. It substi- tutes for the abstract thought of immortality, the rich fulness of a life in which all history and all nature finds its place. It leaves no room for the misgivings which haunt us when we people heaven with creatures of earth. It preserves the chastening thought that we may enter into life incomplete and maimed, if powers of vision or

---

Rest in partial knowledge.                        139

action or movement, the eye, the hand, the foot, in the language of the Gospels, have been lost because they were not consecrated. It helps us to feel how the forgiveness of sins will restore to men their true selves, disguised and hidden before. In this assurance we can look joyfully upon the removal of all that is transitory, knowing that we have our own selves for a better possession and an abiding one.      We ask then no more. We define nothing which Scripture has not defined, as to the limits of the place of human repentance or of the form of divine revelation. We acknowledge what we are and were. And therefore we strive, as we have the power, to deepen our sense of sin, to see it as God has shewn it to us in the Mission of His only Son. We strive to apprehend practically the momentous issues of life, the seed out of which the future must grow. We recognise the condi- tions which must be satisfied in order that we may behold God. We recognise the natural conse- quences of all action. In the face of this antagonism we turn again, humbled it may be by sharp teachings of experience, to our belief in the Holy Spirit active in the Church, active in the single soul. He is sent to us in Christ's name to accomplish in us Christ's work. The Spirit

X. Hebr. x. 34.

---

140                               All preserved and transfigured.

X.

helpeth our infirmities. The Spirit maketh inter- cession for us. The Spirit hallows the temple in which He dwells. He who raised up Christ will quicken also our mortal bodies. Believing this we believe also in the forgiveness of sins and in the resurrection of the flesh.      Believing this we repeat one for another, each for all, the apostle's prayer: The God of peace Him- self sanctify you wholly : and may your spirit and soul and body be preserved entire, without blame, at the presence of our Lord Jesus Christ.      Faithful is He that calleth you Who will also do it.