he will offer up his penances, and mortifications, and pilgrimages, as a satisfaction to justice, and a reason why he should be forgiven and made blessed forever in heaven.  That is a very instructive anecdote which St. Simon relates respecting the last hours of the profligate Louis XIV.  “One day,”—­he says,—­“the king recovering from loss of consciousness asked his confessor, Pere Tellier, to give him absolution for all his sins.  Pere Tellier asked him if he suffered much.  ‘No,’ replied the king, ’that’s what troubles me.  I should like to suffer more, for the expiation of my sins.’” Here was a poor mortal who had spent his days in carnality and transgression of the pure law of God.  He is conscious of guilt, and feels the need of its atonement.  And now, upon the very edge of eternity and brink of doom, he proposes to make his own atonement, to be his own redeemer and save his own soul, by offering up to the eternal nemesis that was racking his conscience a few hours of finite suffering, instead of betaking himself to the infinite passion and agony of Calvary.  This is a work; and, alas, a “dead work,” as St. Paul so often denominates it.  This is the method of justification by works.  But when a man adopts the method of justification by faith, his course is exactly opposite to all this.  Upon discovering that he owes a satisfaction to Eternal Justice for the sins that are past, instead of holding up his prayers, or alms-giving, or penances, or moral efforts, or any work of his own, he holds up the sacrificial work of Christ.  In his prayer to God, he interposes the agony and death of the Great Substitute between his guilty soul, and the arrows of justice.[2] He knows that the very best of his own works, that even the most perfect obedience that a creature could render, would be pierced through and through by the glittering shafts of violated law.  And therefore he takes the “shield of faith.”  He places the oblation of the God-man,—­not his own work and not his own suffering, but another’s work and another’s suffering,—­between himself and the judicial vengeance of the Most High.  And in so doing, he works no work of his own, and no dead work; but he works the “work of God;” he believes on Him whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation for his sins, and not for his only but for the sins of the whole world.

This then is the great doctrine which our Lord taught the Jews, when they asked Him what particular thing or things they must do in order to eternal life.  The apostle John, who recorded the answer of Christ in this instance, repeats the doctrine again in his first Epistle:  “Whatsoever we ask, we receive of Him, because we keep His commandment, and do those things that are pleasing in His sight.  And this is His commandment, that we should believe on the name of His Son Jesus Christ” (1 John iii, 22, 23).  The whole duty of sinful man is here summed up, and concentrated, in the duty to trust in another person than himself, and in another work