The Roman Church does not operate on evangelical principles.  Does it succeed better in cultivating true holiness among its members by its system of penances and its teaching of the meritoriousness of men’s acts of piety?  Catholics say to us sneeringly:  It is easy to have faith; it is very convenient, when you wish to indulge, or have indulged, some passion, to remember that there is grace for forgiveness.  But is any great difficulty connected with going through a penance that the priest has imposed, buying a wax candle, reciting sixteen Paternosters and ten Ave Marias, and then sitting down and saying to yourself:  “Good boy! you’ve done it, you have squared your account again with the Almighty”?  What sanctifying virtue lies in abstaining from beefsteak on Friday?  Rome nowhere has improved men by her mechanical piety.  What she has accomplished was made possible by the fear of purgatorial torments, by slavish dread of her mysterious powers, by ambition and bigotry.  We would not exchange our abused treasures for her system of workmongery.

But the Catholic charge of tendencies to lawlessness that are said to be contained in.  Luther’s teaching of faith without works are more serious.  Luther is cited by them as declaring that one may commit innumerable sins, and they will not harm one as long as one keeps on believing in the grace of forgiveness.  It is true, Luther has spoken words to this effect, and that, on quite a number of occasions.  Worse than that, what Luther has said is actually true.  As a matter of fact, no sin can deprive the believer of salvation.  There is only one sin that ultimately damns, final impenitence and unbelief, by which is understood the rejection of the atonement which Christ offered for the sins of the world.  That atonement is actually the full satisfaction rendered to our Judge for all the sins which we have done, are doing, and will be doing till the end of our lives.  For the person that dies a perfect saint, sinless and impeccable, is still to be born.  The comfort that I derive from my Redeemer to-day will be my comfort to-morrow, that will be my only prop and stay in my dying hour.  I shall need Him every hour.  This is a perfectly Christian thought.  St. John writes:  “My little children, these things write I unto you that ye sin not.  And if any man sin,”—­ mark this well:  “If any man sin,” though he ought not to sin,—­what does the apostle say to him?  He does not say:  Then you are damned! or:  It will require so many fasts, masses, and candles to restore you! but this is what he says:  “If any man sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the Righteous; and He is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only, but also for the sins of the whole world.” (1 John 2, 1. 2.) John, then, must be included in the Catholic indictment of Luther.  Luther would not have been a preacher of the genuine and full Gospel if he had not declared the impossibility of any sin or any number of sins depriving a believer of salvation.