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There is much need of asserting the great truth that God can forgive sin. Science is a teacher much honoured now, and science says that it is as impossible morally as physically to put things back where they were before; as impossible to restore a sinful heart as to make whole a broken shell. Under such teaching has grown up a modern religion whose god is fate, whose hope is dust for the body and nothingness for the soul, whose heaven is but to be an influence in others' lives. The sect is not large, but skilful of speech in philosophy, poetry, fiction. One of them speaks through the hero of a tale: "I hate that talk of people as if there was a way of making amends for everything. They'd more need to see that the wrong they do can never be altered. It's well we should feel that life's a reckoning we can't make twice over; there's no real making amends in this world, any more than you can mend a wrong subtraction by doing your addition right." And the age may need this lesson. We have been guilty of making sin too slight and punishment too soft. "It is good," sing the old Eumenides in AEschylus, "that fear should sit as the guardian of the soul, forcing it into wisdom — good that men should carry a threatening shadow in their hearts under the full sunshine; else how should they learn to revere the right?" True, but God has thought it also good to give His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life. Far diviner is the message of Hawthorne in "The Scarlet Letter," where the badge of sin and shame becomes the charmed symbol of a pure and helpful life. Nature knows nothing of forgiveness; science and conscience as well assure us it is impossible. They speak for their own realms, and truly. But, "when we were yet without strength, in due time Christ died for the ungodly." How God takes care of the disaster wrought by our sin is one of the hidden things. That He will blot out our transgression as a thick cloud vanishes in the sun is His radiant promise. It is a forgiveness which not only enables us to enter heaven; it is heaven, or else, for our race, there were no heaven. God can forgive sins, and God alone; and Jesus is "God with us" forgiving sins and sending penitents away praising with a song that angels could not sing.

(Christian Age.)

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KJV: Who forgiveth all thine iniquities; who healeth all thy diseases;

WEB: who forgives all your sins; who heals all your diseases;