would cease, and those strong cryings and wrestlings till day-break would commence, and the kingdom of heaven would suffer this violence, and the violent would take it by force.  “When I kept silence; my bones waxed old, through my roaring all the day long.  For day and night thy hand was heavy upon me; my moisture was turned into the drought of summer.  I acknowledged my sin unto thee, and mine iniquity I no longer hid.  I said, I will confess my transgressions unto the Lord; and thou forgavest the iniquity of my sin.  For this,”—­because this is Thy method of salvation,—­“shall every one that is godly pray unto thee, in a time when thou mayest be found.” (Ps. xxxii. 3-6.)

Self-examination, then, when joined with a distinct recognition of the Divine character, and a conscious sense of God’s scrutiny, paradoxical as it may appear, is the surest means of producing a firm conviction in a guilty mind that God is merciful, and is the swiftest way of finding Him to be so.  Opposed as the Divine nature is to sin, abhorrent as iniquity is to the pure mind of God, it is nevertheless a fact, that that sinner who goes directly into this Dread Presence with all his sins upon his head, in order to know them, to be condemned and crushed by them, and to confess them, is the one who soonest returns with peace and hope in his soul.  For, he discovers that God is as cordial and sincere in His offer to forgive, as He is in His threat to punish; and having, to his sorrow, felt the reality and power of the Divine anger, he now to his joy feels the equal reality and power of the Divine love.

And this is the one great lesson which every man must learn, or perish forever.  The truthfulness of God, in every respect, and in all relations,—­His strict fidelity to His word, both under the law and under the gospel,—­is a quality of which every one must have a vivid knowledge and certainty, in order to salvation.  Men perish through unbelief.  He that doubteth is damned.  To illustrate.  Men pass through this life doubting and denying God’s abhorrence of sin, and His determination to punish it forever and ever.  Under the narcotic and stupefying influence of this doubt and denial, they remain in sin, and at death go over into the immediate presence of God, only to discover that all His statements respecting His determination upon this subject are true,—­awfully and hopelessly true.  They then spend an eternity, in bewailing their infatuation in dreaming, while here upon earth, that the great and holy God did not mean what he said.

Unbelief, again, tends to death in the other direction, though it is far less liable to result in it.  The convicted and guilt-smitten man sometimes doubts the truthfulness of the Divine promise in Christ.  He spends days of darkness and nights of woe, because he is unbelieving in regard to God’s compassion, and readiness to forgive a penitent; and when, at length, the light of the Divine countenance breaks