generally only rubs salt into the sore by saying it. Jesus Christ
never thus vainly preaches the duty of encouraging ourselves without
giving us ample reasons for the cheerfulness which He enjoins.

With these two remarks to begin with--that we ought to make it a
part of our Christian discipline of ourselves to seek to cultivate a
continuous and equable temperament of calm, courageous good cheer;
and that Jesus Christ never commands such a temper without showing
cause for our obedience--let us turn for a few moments to the
various instances in which this expression falls from His lips.

I. Now the first of them is this of my text, and from it we learn
this truth, that Christ's first contribution to our temper of
equable, courageous cheerfulness is the assurance that all our sins
are forgiven.

'Son, be of good cheer,' said He to that poor palsied sufferer lying
there upon the little light bed in front of Him. He had been brought
to Christ to be cured of his palsy. Our Lord seems to offer him a
very irrelevant blessing when, instead of the healing of his limbs,
He offers him the forgiveness of his sins. That was possibly not
what he wanted most, certainly it was not what the friends who had
brought him wanted for him, but Jesus knew better than they what the
man suffered most from and most needed to have cured. They would
have said 'Palsy.' He said, 'Yes! but palsy that comes from sin.'
For, no doubt, the sick man's disease was 'a sin of flesh avenged in
kind,' and so Christ went to the fountain-head when He said, 'Thy
sins be forgiven thee.' He therein implied, not only that the man
was longing for something more than his four kindly but ignorant
bearers there knew, but also that the root of his disease was