of Corinth to give ecclesiastical absolution, but in order to afford a symbol and assurance of the Divine pardon, in which the guilty man’s grief should not be overwhelming, but that he should become reconciled to himself?  What is meant by the Publican’s going down to his house justified, but that he felt at peace with himself and God?

 3.  It is sorrow with God—­here called godly sorrow; in the margin
 sorrowing according to God.

God sees sin not in its consequences but in itself:  a thing infinitely evil, even if the consequences were happiness to the guilty instead of misery.  So sorrow according to God, is to see sin as God sees it.  The grief of Peter was as bitter as that of Judas.  He went out and wept bitterly; how bitterly none can tell but they who have learned to look on sin as God does.  But in Peter’s grief there was an element of hope; and that sprung precisely from this—­that he saw God in it all.  Despair of self did not lead to despair of God.

This is the great, peculiar feature of this sorrow:  God is there, accordingly self is less prominent.  It is not a microscopic self-examination, nor a mourning in which self is ever uppermost:  my character gone; the greatness of my sin; the forfeiture of my salvation.  The thought of God absorbs all that.  I believe the feeling of true penitence would express itself in such words as these:—­There is a righteousness, though I have not attained it.  There is a purity, and a love, and a beauty, though my life exhibits little of it.  In that I can rejoice.  Of that I can feel the surpassing loveliness.  My doings?  They are worthless, I cannot endure to think of them.  I am not thinking of them.  I have something else to think of.  There, there; in that Life I see it.  And so the Christian—­gazing not on what he is, but on what he desires to be—­dares in penitence to say, That righteousness is mine:  dares, even when the recollection of his sin is most vivid and most poignant, to say with Peter, thinking less of himself than of God, and sorrowing as it were with God—­“Lord, Thou knowest all things, Thou knowest that I love Thee.”

 IX.

 Preached August 4, 1850.

 SENSUAL AND SPIRITUAL EXCITEMENT.

   “Wherefore be ye not unwise, but understanding what the will of
    the Lord is.  And be not drunk with wine, wherein is excess; but be
    filled with the Spirit.”—­Ephesians v. 17, 18.

There is evidently a connection between the different branches of this sentence—­for ideas cannot be properly contrasted which have not some connection—­but what that connection is, is not at first sight clear.  It almost appears like a profane and irreverent juxtaposition to contrast fulness of the Spirit with fulness of wine.  Moreover, the structure of the whole context is antithetical.  Ideas are opposed to each other in pairs of contraries;