a sense of the need
of regeneration--the answer, I think, will come in a quickening of his
conscience. This earnest of the promised deliverance may not, in all
probability will not be what the man desires; he will want only to be
rid of his suffering; but that he cannot have, save in being delivered
from its essential root, a thing infinitely worse than any suffering it
can produce. If he will not have that deliverance, he must keep his
suffering. Through chastisement he will take at last the only way that
leads into the liberty of that which is and must be. There can be no
deliverance but to come out of his evil dream into the glory of God.

It is true that Jesus came, in delivering us from our sins, to deliver
us also from the painful consequences of our sins. But these
consequences exist by the one law of the universe, the true will of the
Perfect. That broken, that disobeyed by the creature, disorganization
renders suffering inevitable; it is the natural consequence of the
unnatural--and, in the perfection of God's creation, the result is
curative of the cause; the pain at least tends to the healing of the
breach. The Lord never came to deliver men from the consequences of
their sins while yet those sins remained: that would be to cast out of
window the medicine of cure while yet the man lay sick; to go dead
against the very laws of being. Yet men, loving their sins, and feeling
nothing of their dread hatefulness, have, consistently with their low
condition, constantly taken this word concerning the Lord to mean that
he came to save them from the punishment of their sins. The idea--the
miserable fancy rather--has terribly corrupted the preaching of the
gospel. The message of the good news has not been truly delivered.
Unable to believe in the forgiveness of their Father in heaven,
imagining him not at liberty to forgive, or incapable of forgiving
forthright; not really believing him God our Saviour, but a God bound,
either in his own nature or by a law above him and compulsory upon him,
to exact some recompense or satisfaction for sin, a multitude of
teaching men have taught their fellows that Jesus came to bear our
punishment and save us from hell. They have represented a result as the
object of his mission--the said result nowise to be desired by true man
save as consequent on the gain of his object. The mission of Jesus was
from the same source and with the same object as the punishment of our
sins. He came to wo