“Did you say the stars were worlds, Tess?”

     “Yes.”

     “All like ours?”

     “I don’t know; but I think so.  They sometimes seem to me like
     the apples on our stubbard-tree.  Most of them splendid and
     sound—­a few blighted.”

     “Which do we live on—­a splendid one, or a blighted one?”

     “A blighted one.”

Or, turn to the works of George Eliot.  No prophet of righteousness ever bound sin and its consequences more firmly together, or proclaimed with more solemn emphasis the certainty of the evil-doer’s doom.  “Our deeds are like children that are born to us,” she says; “nay, children may be strangled, but deeds never”—­this is the note one hears through all her books.  If we have done wrong, it is in vain we cry for mercy.  We are taken by the throat and delivered over to the tormentors until we have paid the uttermost farthing.

    “The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
    Moves on:  nor all your Piety nor Wit
      Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
    Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it.”

And this is all that writers such as these have to say to us.  Retribution they know, but not Redemption.  “There are no arresting angels in the path”—­only the Angel of Justice with the drawn sword.

But this is not the teaching of Jesus concerning sin.  He is not blind, and if we give ear to Him He will not suffer us to be blind, either to its character or its consequences; but He says that sin can be forgiven, and its iron bondage broken.  Jesus believed in the recoverability of man at his worst.  It is a fact significant of much that the first mention of sin in the New Testament is in a prophecy of its destruction:  “Thou shalt call His name Jesus; for it is He that shall save His people from their sins.”  And throughout the first three Gospels sin is named almost exclusively in connection with its forgiveness.[36] What Christ hath joined together let no man put asunder.  Herein is the very gospel of God, that Christ came not to condemn the world, but that the world, through Him, might be saved.  “Do you know what Christ would say to you, my girl?” said a missionary to a poor girl dying.  “He would say, ’Thy sins are forgiven thee.’” “Would He, though, would He?” she cried, starting up; “take me to Him, take me to Him.”  Yes, thank God, we know what to do with our sin; we know what we must do to be saved.

Let us go back again for a moment over the ground we have already travelled.  We are in debt, with nothing to pay; but Christ has taken the long account, and has crossed it through and through.  We are in bondage, with no power to set ourselves free; but Christ has come to rend the iron chain and proclaim deliverance to the captives.  We are wrong, wrong within, wrong at the core; but again He is equal to our need, for concerning Him it is written that He shall take away not only the “sins” but