love, and narrowed the path to heaven; you have hampered religion with so many mysterious questions and quibbles that I cannot find the way to God; you have terrified me with so many snares and pitfalls on every side, that I dare not tread at all.  Give me peace; give me human guidance:  I want a human arm to lean on.”

This is a cry, I believe, becoming daily more passionate, and more common.  And no wonder that all our information, public and private, is to the same effect—­that the recent converts have found peace in Rome; for the secret of the power of Rome is this—­that she grounds her teaching, not on variable feelings and correct opinions, but on facts.  God is not a highly probable God, but a fact.  God’s forgiveness is not a feeling, but a fact; and a material symbolic fact is the witness of the invisible one.  Rome puts forward her absolution—­her false, priestly, magical absolution—­a visible fact, as a witness of the invisible.  And her perversion prevails because founded on a truth.

 II.  The power of the positive truth.

Is it any wonder, if taught on every side distrust of man, the heart should by a violent reaction, and by an extravagant confidence in a priest, proclaim that its normal, natural state is not distrust, but trust?

What is forgiveness?—­It is God reconciled to us.  What is absolution?—­It is the authoritative declaration that God is reconciled.  Authoritative:  that is a real power of conveying a sense and feeling of forgiveness.  It is the power of the Son of Man on earth to forgive sins.  It is man, God’s image, representing, by his forgiveness on earth, God’s forgiveness in heaven.

Now distinguish God’s forgiveness of sin from an arresting of the consequences of sin.  When God forgives a sin, it does not follow that He stops its consequences:  for example, when He forgives the intemperate man whose health is ruined, forgiveness does not restore his health.  Divine pardon does not interfere with the laws of the universe, for it is itself one of those laws.  It is a law that penalty follows transgression.  Forgiveness will not save from penalty; but it alters the feelings with which the penalty is accepted.  Pain inflicted with a surgeon’s knife for a man’s good, is as keen as that which results from the knife of the torturer; but in the one case it is calmly borne, because remedial—­in the other it exasperates, because it is felt to be intended by malevolence.  So with the difference between suffering which comes from a sin which we hope God has forgiven, and suffering which seems to fall hot from the hand of an angry God.  It is a fearful truth, that so far as we know at least, the consequences of an act are connected with it indissolubly.  Forgiveness does not arrest them; but by producing softness and grateful penitence, it transforms them into blessings.  This is God’s forgiveness; and absolution is the conveyance to the