Further, in Him we have the certainty of pardon.  Every deep heart-experience amongst men has felt the necessity of having a clear certainty and knowledge about forgiveness.  Men do not feel it always.  A man can skate over the surface of the great deeps that lie beneath the most frivolous life, and may suppose, in his superficial way of looking at things, that there is no need for any definite teaching about sin and the mode of dealing with it.  But once bring that man face to face, in a quiet hour, with the facts of his life and of a divine law, and all that superficial ignoring of evil in himself and of the dread of punishment and consequences, passes away.  I am sure of this, that no religion will ever go far and last long and work mightily, and lay a sovereign hand upon human life, which has not a most plain and decisive message to preach in reference to pardon.  And I am sure of this, that one reason for the comparative feebleness of much so-called Christian teaching in this generation is just that the deepest needs of a man’s conscience are not met by it.  In a religion on which the whole spirit of a man may rest itself, there must be a very plain message about what is to be done with sin.  The only message which answers to the needs of an awakened conscience and an alarmed heart is the old-fashioned message that Jesus Christ the Righteous has died for us sinful men.  All other religions have felt after a clear doctrine of forgiveness, and all have failed to find it.  Here is the divine ‘Yea!’ And on it alone we can suspend the whole weight of our soul’s salvation.  The rope that is to haul us out of the horrible pit and the miry clay had much need to be tested before we commit ourselves to it.  There are plenty of easygoing superficial theories about forgiveness predominant in the world to-day.  Except the one that says, ’In whom we have redemption through His blood, even the forgiveness of sin,’ they are all like the rope let down into the dark mine to lift the captives beneath, half of the strands of which have been cut on the sharp edge above, and when the weight hangs on to it, it will snap.  There is nothing on which a man who has once learned the tragical meaning and awful reality and depth of the fact of his transgression can suspend his forgiveness, except this, that ’Christ has died, the just for the unjust, to bring us unto God.’  ‘In Him the promise is yea.’

And, again, we have in Christ divine certainties in regard to life.  We have in Him the absolutely perfect pattern to which we are to conform our whole doings.  And so, notwithstanding that there may, and will still be many uncertainties and much perplexity, we have the great broad lines of morals and of duty traced with a firm hand, and all that we need to know of obligation and of perfectness lies in this—­Be like Jesus Christ!  So the solemn commandments of the ethical side of Divine Revelation, as well as the promises of it, get their ‘yea’ in Jesus Christ, and He stands the Law of our lives.