men.

ing is a consequence of evil; but it can neither repair, nor destroy, nor redeem it. This will not move the heart of God; no, not though it were infinite! One additional wretched person does not make one less guilty person; thousands of unhappy beings do not tend to increase the sum of good; and though you should show me all passive sufferings, present and future, heaped together on the same head and at the same moment, if you have nothing else to offer to God, if there is not in this infinite pain the display of an infinite holiness, nothing has been accomplished towards the pardon and salvation of What idea do we form of God when we imagine that He can only be appeased by being avenged, and avenged in the literal sense of the word! What? He will not pardon till all the tears and blood of His enemy have flowed? That is a mockery of pardon which is nothing but the retaliation of heaven against earth! If suffering, an infinite suffering, enters into atonement, as we shall show it does, it is not suffering considered simply as such; and those who think that our sorrows, regarded merely as sorrows, appease the wrath of God, form as false an idea of the matter as those who think that He has inflicted them upon His creatures without a moral necessity. Their god resembles the savage chief who will not be appeased towards his enemy till he has dipped his arrow in his blood. If this is their god, he is not ours. Such a god inspires us with horror; we cannot perceive his justice any more than his love. He is a Moloch, who is honoured just in proportion to the number of human victims consumed upon his altar.

The distressing part of such theories is that, to all our woes, which they pretend to explain, they add another, and that the worst of all; they hide God's face, they take Him from us. They do not lessen the miseries of earth; and when we raise our eyes to heaven to seek for help, lo! it is empty and dismal. As long as my God remains, nothing is lost; but when He is taken from me then all fails. How can I keep myself from despair? Who

shall deliver me? Of what use is it to call, like the psalmist, for the wings of the dove or even of the eagle? They would only bear me into a gloomy desert, since if I ascended I should find nothing but a dead god. But it is not so, ye afflicted ones of the earth; you have a Father in heaven. Above, all is bright, increasingly bright; from all your darkness there does not arise one shadow to cover the face of your God. Our sufferings con

demn none but ourselves, and the gospel is called good news simply because it gives us the solution of the painful problem. Let us take this as our first consolation!

At the outset I am struck with the fair and emphatic manner in which the question is stated. Christianity does not lower our conception of the enemy it seeks to destroy. Certain of victory, it presents him just as he is in reality. No picture of suffering can equal that which the Bible has drawn; it is as worthy of admiration in this respect as for its descriptions of the glory and felicity of God; and it is precisely because it brings together and contrasts true and eternal happiness with our troubled and wretched life, that it reaches a pathos so touching. It has given condemnation its true. name, the one which best expresses, in a single word, all that it is and all that it blights and destroys. Our text calls it death! It is in fact the power of death which has stricken the ground beneath our feet with barrenness, so that our food has to be drawn from it by the sweat of our brow; which has filled the air we breathe with deadly vapours; which cleaves to our body and stealthily undermines it till it lays it in the dust whence it came; and which at last, placing its iron hand on our hearts, presses, stifles, and breaks them! This world belongs to death. It is his pale kingdom; his breath passes over every flower, withers every life, and freezes every soul. Man is a culprit, an outlaw, the constant prey of the destroying power which breaks off all the branches of the tree one after another, before cutting it down at the root by a last blow of the axe. But the Bible is not satisfied

with these general features; it not only describes pain as it is in itself, but also each of our sufferings. From Rachel, who will not be comforted because her children are not, to the poor man covered with sores and laid at the rich man's door, there is not one of the sad scenes of human life which is not depicted in a few simple, profound words, that are never forgotten and that leave an ineffaceable impression on the mind. It does more; it lays open to our view the heart of the afflicted, it tells their sorrows, it repeats their complaints. I hear the tearful, groaning, and yet believing prayers of David in his various trials. I am made acquainted with his moral crises, with the conflict of feelings by which his heart is torn. The inner tempest, the nameless anguish of Job, cruelly smitten and unjustly accused; his faintheartedness, his murmurings, his despairing cry from out of the deep waters,—everything is revealed to me in vehement words. The bitter tears of Peter after his fall, and the sigh of weariness which Paul heaves, teach me to know other but no less painful crises of the soul. If there is no height to which the Bible does not rise, there is no depth to which it does not descend. I can never go so far in moral agony, but what it has gone before me. Yes; though I should descend into those abysses where every bright ray seems to be quenched, I should meet with the traces of an inspired writer. If I am in anguish, the Bible is in anguish with me, like the God who gave it me; and this is why it is the book of the afflicted, written for them, and as I would even say, written by them.

We have now to inquire what Origin the Bible ascribes to Suffering, the gravity of which it certainly has not underrated. "By sin," says St. Paul, "death entered into the world." You understand his meaning. It follows that, unless we attribute sin to God Himself, we must completely exonerate Him in regard to this terrible invasion of our world by suffering. Not one of our afflictions is attributable to Him. He no more created this

world for sorrow than for sin. When God looked down upon His finished work of creation, "he beheld all that he had made," says the Book of Genesis, "and lo, it was very good." How could it have been otherwise? After the creation of each fresh series of beings, we read these words, which sound like a sublime refrain, "God blessed them!" Every creature has been hailed with this blessing on the very threshold of life. Creation is a manifestation of eternal love, and as it were a pouring forth of its wealth in time and in space. "God saw all that he had made, and behold it was very good." Wherever He turned His eye, He beheld happiness and glory. The scale of being was bright with joy and life; the blessing rose and increased from step to step, up to the creatures who were nearest to God, and in whom His image shone. Who can say what God saw when at one glance He beheld the young and glorious world, which had just issued from His hands and which bore the impress of His perfections? Who can describe the scene of beauty illumined by the first sunbeams that shone on this smiling earth, none of whose voices was plaintive? Who can describe the spectacle it presented when, summing up in one all the blessings He had lavished upon it, God blessed it on the seventh day, and rested to contemplate a work worthy of Himself? If you allege the traces of death that furrow the ground on which we stand, and the vast ruins of former worlds, I reply that, notwithstanding those thousands of years, we are but of yesterday, and are ignorant of the dramas that may have been enacted in a former world. It remains none the less certain that we are warranted in saying, with regard to each of God's creations, as they came forth from His hands, "He beheld it, and lo, it was very good."

What then is the great destroyer, "the great interpolator of creation," to employ Tertullian's expression? Who has devastated this lovely world? Who has opened its gates to suffering and death? Christianity answers with a single word, the word of our text, "By sin death

entered into the world." I have not now to consider the grave question of sin itself; I take it in its simplest and most elementary signification. "Sin," according to the words of St. John, is "the transgression of the law;" it is rebellion against the will of God. Nor shall I enter into the question of original sin; here also it is enough to say with St. Paul, that death and suffering reign over all men, because all have sinned." Is there any one of my readers who has not sinned, and who is perfectly pure? If there is, then I admit he has some right to bring forward his claim; but if there is not one but must say, "I also have been rebellious; I also have broken God's law," in that case, of what can we complain? Let us be silent, and admit the justice of God. Is not sin disorder, and the worst kind of disorder? Is it not the height of anarchy, is it not the violation of the law of the moral world? And you would have this disorder, this anarchy, bring no consequences in their train; you would have everything be as if order reigned! But, first, this cannot be; sin not only produces suffering, it is its very principle and essence. Either say that God is not the supreme Good, or admit that the creature cannot break the bond that unites him to God without cutting himself off from well-being and happiness. Either say that the soul is not made for God, degrade it to the rank of one of the lower creatures not destined to the higher life; or admit that it loses this higher life, that it suffers and dies, by violently separating itself from God. Suffering, immeasurable suffering, is inherent in evil. You cannot prevent its being so; and as long as rebellion exists, suffering will follow sin as the shadow follows the substance: or, more correctly speaking, it cannot be severed from it. To ask God that it might be otherwise would be to ask Him to cease from being God, in other words, from being the Source of life, glory, and happiness.

But I go farther, and I maintain that God is not content to let evil produce suffering by a sort of natural law; He has willed that it should be thus. He has inter