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speak, in a lock not made exactly for it. Now the Spirit has spoken to your soul of sin; and with a blessed intuition you behold, and believe, the divine provision for your release alike from its guilt and from its power. "Rock of Ages" is a new hymn to the man who is convinced by the Paraclete of sin, righteousness, and judgment. And wonderfully now does the Bible open itself to that man, and fall into order and relation before him, and disclose its inner harmonies in his sight. The Protevan- Gen. iii. 15. gelium of Genesis is no myth to him now, nor are the sacrifices of the Mosaic altar an invention of man. Every type and prophecy is lighted up by its relation to the Cross, and in turn lights up the convinced man's apprehension of the Cross in the holy details of its ever-blessed significance. And precious indeed to him now is every trace of apostolic doctrine which unfolds the treasures of the accomplished mystery of Calvary. The third chapter of the Romans, and of the Galatians, and the whole teaching of the Hebrews, culminating in xiii 20, 21, are dear to him now with a sense of personal companionship and intimacy. So Jesus Crucified,

I Pet. i. 3.

like the celestial bow upon the cloud, is manifested as God's Antithesis to the manifestation of the guilt of sin. And so is Jesus Risen manifested, as He had not been, as He could not be before, in all the glory of His finished. work, and His indwelling and sin-subduing Presence (by the same Spirit who has thus convinced the soul), and in all the warmth and radiance of that "living hope" to which the man is now personally and individually "begotten again." And as this richly blessed penitent looks forward to the now dear and happy prospect of the life to come, in the peace and strength of an evidence of its reality as real as it is internal, what is his anticipation? He looks for a world, a life, a work, of sinless bliss, of entire and positive holiness in everlasting personal joy; but he looks to live, love, and serve there as one who will for ever rejoice (wonderful paradox) to remember that "when

Rom. v. 8. we were sinners, Christ died for us," and to praise the blessed Name not of an abstract Deity but of "GOD and of THE Rev. vii. 10. LAMB."

Was it too bold of the medieval believers

CONVICTION, THE PASTOR'S NEED. 97

to say, "O beata culfa, quæ talem meruisti Redemptorem;" "Blessed guilt, which hast won such a Redeemer "?

We need conviction for ourselves as individuals, if our personal religion is to strike root downward, and so to bear fruit upward. The man who knows little of conviction of sin, as a genuine element in personal experience, may be many good things, but I do not think he can be a deep Christian.

And greatly do we pastors need this for our ministry. A full, strong current of opinion in the professing Church of Christ runs at the present day directly against a grave, thoroughgoing, doctrine of sin, and its correlative truths of eternal judgment, and of the unspeakable need of the atoning blood, and of living personal faith in the Crucified and Risen One, "according to the Scriptures." One would

think that some even earnest teachers had learned, by some other path surely than that of the Word of God, to look with temperate eyes upon sin, as a phenomenon sure at last to disappear under long processes of divine Order; a discord awaiting only its musical

resolution; a "fall upward," perhaps, on to some higher level of enriched consciousness.

Let no man deceive us with vain words. And let us pray that our lips may never pass them on. And to that intent may the Holy Spirit of Promise evermore teach us, close to the Cross and to the open Grave, His lessons of sin, of righteousness, and of judgment.

Even so. But from every other aspect of the matter we must say, we must cry, the very opposite of "O beata culpa." And we who believe, and who have been convinced of sin, righteousness, and judgment, must humbly and persistently look to the same holy Convincer who began the work that He may deepen it and develop it throughout our whole lives, and (let me add to my ministerial brethren) throughout our whole ministry. If in one aspect the conviction of sin is the great initial work of the Spirit, from another aspect it is a work which we can never dare to wish Him to wind up here below. Has the believer ever reached the real end of self-discovery? Has he ever really seen with ultimate adequacy how truly his happiest actual obedience “cannot

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endure the severity of the divine judgment"?1
Has he ever quite fully realized his need of
Christ for him"? No, he has not.
So now,

and to-morrow, and always, we will ask the Convincer to carry on in the blessed home o Grace the lesson He mercifully began upon the desert sands; to keep us alive and awake, tenderly, humbly, and evermore, to sin, and righteousness, and judgment, in the light, in the blissful light, of Christ.

1 Article XII. See below, p. 188.