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, ready to produce bad actions, that we need to be delivered from.  Against this badness if a man will not strive, he is left to commit evil and reap the consequences.  To be saved from these consequences, would be no deliverance; it would be an immediate, ever deepening damnation.  It is the evil in our being—­no essential part of it, thank God!—­the miserable fact that the very child of God does not care for his father and will not obey him, causing us to desire wrongly, act wrongly, or, where we try not to act wrongly, yet making it impossible for us not to feel wrongly—­this is what he came to deliver us from;—­not the things we have done, but the possibility of doing