of punishment. The averted look, the cold voice, the absence of signs of
love are far harder to bear than so-called punishment. And the
forgiveness, which belongs to love only, comes when the film between the
two is swept away, and both the offended and the offender feel that
there is no barrier to the free, unchecked flow of love from the heart
of the aggrieved to the heart of the aggressor.

We must carry both of these ideas into our thoughts of God's pardon in
order to see the whole fulness of it. And perhaps we may have to add yet
another illustration, drawn from another region, and which is enshrined
in one of the versions of the Lord's Prayer, where we read, 'Forgive us
our _debts_.' When a debt is forgiven it is cancelled, and the payment
of it no longer required. But the two elements that I have pointed out,
the remission of the penalty and the uninterrupted flow of God's love,
are inseparably united in the full Scriptural notion of forgiveness.

Scripture recognises as equally real and valid, in our relations to God,
the judicial and the fatherly side of the relationship. And it declares
as plainly that the wages of sin is death as it declares that God's love
cannot come in its fulness and its sweetness, upon a heart that indulges
in unconfessed and unrepented sin. They are poor friends of men who, for
the sake of smoothing away the terrible side of the Gospel, minimise or
hide the reality of the awful penalties which attach to every
transgression and disobedience, because they thereby maim the notion of
the divine forgiveness, and lull into a fatal slumber the consciences of
many men.

Dear brethren! I have to stand here saying, 'Knowing, therefore, the
terrors of the Lord, we persuade men.' This is sure and certain, that
over and above the forcing back upon itself of the love of God by my