struggle to be better and to do better, ought certainly to avail for my
pardon." Or, if he has been educated in a superstitious Church, he will
offer up his penances, and mortifications, and pilgrimages, as a
satisfaction to justice, and a reason why he should be forgiven and made
blessed forever in heaven. That is a very instructive anecdote which St.
Simon relates respecting the last hours of the profligate Louis XIV. "One
day,"--he says,--"the king recovering from loss of consciousness asked
his confessor, Pere Tellier, to give him absolution for all his sins.
Pere Tellier asked him if he suffered much. 'No,' replied the king,
'that's what troubles me. I should like to suffer more, for the expiation
of my sins.'" Here was a poor mortal who had spent his days in carnality
and transgression of the pure law of God. He is conscious of guilt, and
feels the need of its atonement. And now, upon the very edge of eternity
and brink of doom, he proposes to make his own atonement, to be his own
redeemer and save his own soul, by offering up to the eternal nemesis
that was racking his conscience a few hours of finite suffering, instead
of betaking himself to the infinite passion and agony of Calvary. This is
a work; and, alas, a "_dead_ work," as St. Paul so often denominates it.
This is the method of justification by works. But when a man adopts the
method of justification by faith, his course is exactly opposite to all
this. Upon discovering that he owes a satisfaction to Eternal Justice for
the sins that are past, instead of holding up his prayers, or
alms-giving, or penances, or moral efforts, or any work of his own, he
holds up the sacrificial work of Christ. In his prayer to God, he
interposes the agony and death of the Great Substitute between his guilty
soul, and the arrows of justice.[2] He knows that the very best of his
own works, that even the most perfect obedience that a creature could
render, would be pierced through and through by the glittering shafts of
violated law. And therefore he takes the "shield of faith." He places the
oblation of the God-man,--not his own work and not his own suffering, but
another's work and another's suffering,--between himself and the judicial
vengeance of the Most High. And in so doing, he works no work of his own,
and no dead work; but he works the "work of God;" he _believes_ on Him
whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation for his sins, and not for
his only but for the sins of t