rk along with our punishment. He came to side with
it, and set us free from our sins. No man is safe from hell until he is
free from his sins; but a man to whom his sins, that is the evil things
in him, are a burden, while he may indeed sometimes feel as if he were
in hell, will soon have forgotten that ever he had any other hell to
think of than that of his sinful condition. For to him his sins are
hell; he would go to the other hell to be free of them; free of them,
hell itself would be endurable to him. For hell is God's and not the
devil's. Hell is on the side of God and man, to free the child of God
from the corruption of death. Not one soul will ever be redeemed from
hell but by being saved from his sins, from the evil in him. If hell be
needful to save him, hell will blaze, and the worm will writhe and bite,
until he takes refuge in the will of the Father. 'Salvation from hell,
is salvation as conceived by such to whom hell and not evil is the
terror.' But if even for dread of hell a poor soul seek the Father, he
will be heard of him in his terror, and, taught of him to seek the
immeasurably greater gift, will in the greater receive the less.

There is another important misapprehension of the words of the
messengers of the good tidings--that they threaten us with punishment
because of the sins we have committed, whereas their message is of
forgiveness, not of vengeance; of deliverance, not of evil to come. Not
for anything he has committed do they threaten a man with the outer
darkness. Not for any or all of his sins that are past shall a man be
condemned; not for the worst of them needs he dread remaining
unforgiven. The sin he dwells in, the sin he will not come out of, is
the sole ruin of a man. His present, his live sins--those pervading his
thoughts and ruling his conduct; the sins he keeps doing, and will not
give up; the sins he is called to abandon, and clings to; the same sins
which are the cause of his misery, though he may not know it--these are
they for which he is even now condemned. It is true the memory of the
wrongs we have done is, or will become very bitter; but not for those is
condemnation; and if that in our character which made them possible were
abolished, remorse would lose its worst bitterness in the hope of future
amends. 'This is the condemnation, that light is come into the world,
and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were
evil.'

It is the indwelling badness,