sin, that sin by necessary consequence will work out awful results for
the doer in the present and in the future. I do not wish to dwell upon
that thought, only remember that God is a Judge and God is the Father,
and that the divine forgiveness includes both of these elements, the
sweeping away of the penal consequences of men's sin, wholly in the
future, and to some extent in the present; and the unchecked flow of the
love of God to a man's heart.

There are awful words in Scripture--which are not to be ruled out of it
by any easy-going, optimistic, rose-water system of a mutilated
Christianity--there are awful words in Scripture, concerning what you
and I must come to if we live and die in our sins, and there would be no
message of forgiveness worth the proclaiming to men, if it had nothing
to say about the removal of that which a man's own unsophisticated
conscience tells him is certain, the fatal and the damnable effects of
his departure from God.

But let us not forget that these two aspects do to a large extent
coincide, when we come to remember that the worst of all the penal
consequences of sin is that it separates from God, and exposes to 'the
wrath of God,' a terrible expression by which the Bible means the
necessary disapprobation and aversion of the divine nature, being such
as it is, from man's sin.

Experimentalists will sometimes cut off one or other of the triple rays
of which sunlight is composed by passing the beam through some medium
which intercepts the red, or the violet, or the yellow, as may chance.
And my sin makes an atmosphere which cuts off the gentler rays of that
divine nature, and lets the fiery ones of retribution come through. It
is not that a sinful man, howsoever drenched overhead in the foul pool