principles of law and justice, we can tell beforehand what the Divine method will be.  We do not need any special revelation, to inform us that God is a just Being, and that His anger is kindled against wickedness, and that He will punish the transgressor.  This class of truths, the Apostle informs us, are written in the human constitution, and we have already seen that they were known and dreaded in the pagan world.  That which God must do, He certainly will do.  He must be just, and therefore He certainly will punish sin, is the reasoning of the human mind, the-world over, and in every age.[4]

But, when we pass from the punishment of sin to the pardon of it, when we go over to the merciful side of the Divine Nature, we can come to no certain conclusions, if we are shut up to the workings of our own minds, or to the teachings of the world of nature about us.  Picture to yourself a thoughtful pagan, like Solon the legislator of Athens, living in the heart of heathenism five centuries before Christ, and knowing nothing of the promise of mercy which broke faintly through the heavens immediately after the apostasy of the first human pair, and which found its full and victorious utterance in the streaming, blood of Calvary.  Suppose that the accusing and condemning law written, upon his conscience had shown its work, and made him conscious of sin.  Suppose that the question had risen within him, whether that Dread Being whom he “ignorantly worshipped,” and against whom he had committed the offence, would forgive it; was there anything in his own soul, was there anything in the world around him or above him, that could give him an affirmative answer?  The instant he put the question:  Will God punish me for my transgression? the affirming voices were instantaneous and authoritative.  “The soul that sinneth it shall die” was the verdict that came forth from the recesses of his moral nature, and was echoed and re-echoed in the suffering, pain, and physical death of a miserable and groaning world all around him.  But when he put the other question to himself:  Will the Deity pardon me for my transgression? there was no affirmative answer from any source of knowledge accessible to him.  If he sought a reply from the depths of his own conscience, all that he could hear was the terrible utterance:  “The soul that sinneth it shall die.”  The human conscience can no more promise, or certify, the forgiveness of sin, than the ten commandments can do so.  When, therefore, this pagan, convicted of sin, seeks a comforting answer to his anxious inquiry respecting the Divine clemency towards a criminal, he is met only with retributive thunders and lightnings; he hears only that accusing and condemning law which is written on the heart, and experiences that fearful looking-for of judgment and fiery indignation which St. Paul describes, in the first chapter of Romans, as working in the mind of the universal pagan world.