beyond the skies is not nature
personified, but a supernatural Personality. It is to this highest
Personality that all religions address themselves. It is to bring man
into communion with Him that they exist.[133]

[Footnote 132: "Beyond all these heavens the God of the heavens
resides."]

[Footnote 133: Guizot, "L'Eglise et la Societe Chretiennes" en 1861.]

4. The Athenians had that deep consciousness of sin and guilt, and of
consequent liability to punishment, which confesses the need of
expiation by piacular sacrifices.

Every man feels himself to be an accountable being, and he is conscious
that in wrong-doing he is deserving of blame and of punishment. Deep
within the soul of the transgressor is the consciousness that he is a
guilty man, and he is haunted with the perpetual apprehension of a
retribution which, like the spectre of evil omen, crosses his every
path, and meets him at every turn.

"'Tis guilt alone,
Like brain-sick frenzy in its feverish mode,
Fills the light air with visionary terrors,
And shapeless forms of fear."

Man does not possess this consciousness of guilt so much as it holds
possession of him. It pursues the fugitive from justice, and it lays
hold on the man who has resisted or escaped the hand of the executioner.
The sense of guilt is a power over and above man; a power so wonderful
that it often compels the most reckless criminal to deliver himself up,
with the confession of his deed, to the sword of justice, when a
falsehood would have easily protected him. Man is only able by
persevering, ever-repeated efforts at self-induration, against the
remonstrances of conscience, to withdraw himself from its power. His
success is, however, but very partial; for sometimes, in the moments of
his greatest security, the reproaches of conscience break in upon him
like a flood, and sweep away all his refuge of lies. "The evil
conscience is the divine bond which binds the created spirit, even in
deep apostasy, to its Original. In the consciousness of guilt there is
revealed the essential relation of our spirit to God, although
misunderstood by man until he has something higher than his evil
conscience. The trouble and anguish which the remonstrances of this
consciousness excite--the inward unrest which sometimes seizes the slave
of sin--are proofs that he has not quite broken away from God."[134]

[Footnote 134: Mueller, "Christian Doctrine of Sin," vol. i. pp. 225,
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