If there were no forgiveness of sins, if mercy were not a manifested attribute of God, all self-examination, and especially all this conjoint divine scrutiny, would be a pure torment and a pure gratuity.  It is wretchedness to know that we are guilty sinners, but it is the endless torment to know that there is no forgiveness, either here or hereafter.  Convince a man that he will never be pardoned, and you shut him up with the spirits in prison.  Compel him to examine himself under the eye of his God, while at the same time he has no hope of mercy,—­and there would be nothing unjust in this,—­and you distress him with the keenest and most living torment of which a rational spirit is capable.  Well and natural was it, that the earliest creed of the Christian Church emphasized the doctrine of the Divine Pity; and in all ages the Apostolic Symbol has called upon the guilt-stricken human soul to cry, “I believe in the forgiveness of sins.”

We have the amplest assurance in the whole written Revelation of God, but nowhere else, that “there is forgiveness with Him, that He may be feared.”  “Whoso confesseth and forsaketh his sins shall find mercy;” and only with such an assurance as this from His own lips, could we summon courage to look into our character and conduct, and invite God to do the same.  But the text is an exceedingly explicit assertion of this great truth.  The very same Being who invites us to reason with Him, and canvass the subject of our criminality, in the very same breath, if we may so speak, assures us that He will forgive all that is found in this examination.  And upon such terms, cannot the criminal well afford to examine into his crime?  He has a promise beforehand, that if he will but scrutinize and confess his sin it shall be forgiven.  God would have been simply and strictly just, had He said to him:  “Go down into the depths of thy transgressing spirit, see how wicked thou hast been and still art, and know that in my righteous severity I will never pardon thee, world without end.”  But instead of this, He says:  “Go down into the depths of thy heart, see the transgression and the corruption all along the line of the examination, confess it into my ear, and I will make the scarlet and crimson guilt white in the blood of my own Son.”  These declarations of Holy Writ, which are a direct verbal statement from the lips of God, and which specify distinctly what He will do and will not do in the matter of sin, teach us that however deeply our souls shall be found to be stained, the Divine pity outruns and exceeds the crime.  “For as the heavens are high above the earth, so great is his mercy towards them that fear him.  He that spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all, how shall he not with him also freely give us all things?” Here upon earth, there is no wickedness that surpasses the pardoning love of God in Christ.  The words which Shakspeare puts into the mouth of the remorseful, but impenitent, Danish king are strictly true: