heresy, however vehement. We are trying who can
protest loudest. Every book, every journal, rings with warnings.
"Beware!" is written upon everything. Beware of Rome; beware of
Geneva; beware of Germany; some danger on every side; Satan
everywhere--God _nowhere_; everywhere some man to be shunned or
dreaded--nowhere one to be loved freely and without suspicion. Is it
any wonder if men and women, in the midst of negations, cry, "Ye warn
me from the error, but who will guide me into truth? I want guidance.
I am sinful, full of evil! I want forgiveness! Absolve me; tell me
that I am pardoned; help me to believe it. Your quarrels do not help
me; if you cannot do _that_, it matters little what you _can_ do. You
have restricted God's love, and narrowed the path to heaven; you have
hampered religion with so many mysterious questions and quibbles that
I cannot find the way to God; you have terrified me with so many
snares and pitfalls on every side, that I dare not tread at all. Give
me peace; give me human guidance: I want a human arm to lean on."

This is a cry, I believe, becoming daily more passionate, and more
common. And no wonder that all our information, public and private, is
to the same effect--that the recent converts have found peace in Rome;
for the secret of the power of Rome is this--that she grounds her
teaching, not on variable feelings and correct opinions, but on
_facts_. God is not a highly probable God, but a _fact_. God's
forgiveness is not a feeling, but a _fact_; and a material symbolic
fact is the witness of the invisible one. Rome puts forward her
absolution--her false, priestly, magical absolution--a visible fact,
as a witness of the invisible. And her perversion prevails because
founded on a truth.

II. The power of the positive truth.

Is it any wonder, if taught on every side distrust of man, the heart
should by a violent reaction, and by an extravagant confidence in a
priest, proclaim that its normal, natural state is not distrust, but
trust?

What is forgiveness?--It is God reconciled to us. What is
absolution?--It is the authoritative declaration that God is
reconciled. Authoritative: that is a real power of conveying a sense
and feeling of forgiveness. It is the power of the Son of Man _on
earth_ to forgive sins. It is man, God's image, representing, by his
forgiveness on earth, God's forgiveness in heaven.

Now distinguish God's forgiveness of sin