pth, on our estimate
of the wrath from which it delivers.

So, dear brethren, remember, if you tamper with the one you destroy the
other; if there be no fearful judgment from which men need to be
delivered, Christ has borne nothing for us that entitles Him to demand
our hearts; and all the ascriptions of praise and adoration to Him, and
all the surrender of loving hearts, in utter self-abandonment, to Him
that has borne the curse for us, fade and are silent. If you strike out
the truth of Christ's bearing the results of sin from your theology, you
do not thereby exalt, but you fatally lower the love; and in the
interests of the loftiest conceptions of a divine loving-kindness and
mercy that ever have blessed the world, I beseech you, be on your guard
against all teachings that diminish the sinfulness of sin, and that ask
again the question which first of all came from lips that do not commend
it to us--'_Hath_ God said?' or advance to the assertion--'Ye shall
_not_ surely die.' If 'I come to smite the earth with a curse' ceases to
be a truth to you, 'the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ' will fade away
for you likewise.

III. Now, still further, let me ask you to consider, lastly, the
alternative which these texts open for us.

I believe that the order in which they stand in Scripture is the order
in which men generally come to believe them, and to feel them. I am
old-fashioned enough and narrow enough to believe in conversion; and to
believe further that, as a rule, the course through which the soul
passes from darkness into light is the course which divine revelation
took: first, the unveiling of sin and its issues, and then the glad
leaping up of the trustful heart to the conception of redeeming grace.

But what I seek briefly to suggest now is, not only the order of
manifestation as brought out in these words, but also the alternative
which they present to us, one branch or other of which every soul of you
will have to experience. You must have either the destruction or the
grace. And, more wonderful still, the same coming of the same Lord will
be to one man the destruction, and to another the manifestation and
reception of His perfect grace. As it was in the Lord's first coming,
'He is set for the rise and the fall of many in Israel.' The same heat
softens some substances and bakes others into hardness. A bit of wax and
a bit of clay put into the same fire--one becomes liquefied and the
other solidified. The same