To save a man from his sins, is to say to him, in sense perfect and eternal, ’Rise up and walk.  Be at liberty in thy essential being.  Be free as the son of God is free.’  To do this for us, Jesus was born, and remains born to all the ages.  When misery drives a man to call out to the source of his life,—­and I take the increasing outcry against existence as a sign of the growth of the race toward a sense of the need of regeneration—­the answer, I think, will come in a quickening of his conscience.  This earnest of the promised deliverance may not, in all probability will not be what the man desires; he will want only to be rid of his suffering; but that he cannot have, save in being delivered from its essential root, a thing infinitely worse than any suffering it can produce.  If he will not have that deliverance, he must keep his suffering.  Through chastisement he will take at last the only way that leads into the liberty of that which is and must be.  There can be no deliverance but to come out of his evil dream into the glory of God.

It is true that Jesus came, in delivering us from our sins, to deliver us also from the painful consequences of our sins.  But these consequences exist by the one law of the universe, the true will of the Perfect.  That broken, that disobeyed by the creature, disorganization renders suffering inevitable; it is the natural consequence of the unnatural—­and, in the perfection of God’s creation, the result is curative of the cause; the pain at least tends to the healing of the breach.  The Lord never came to deliver men from the consequences of their sins while yet those sins remained:  that would be to cast out of window the medicine of cure while yet the man lay sick; to go dead against the very laws of being.  Yet men, loving their sins, and feeling nothing of their dread hatefulness, have, consistently with their low condition, constantly taken this word concerning the Lord to mean that he came to save them from the punishment of their sins.  The idea—­the miserable fancy rather—­has terribly corrupted the preaching of the gospel.  The message of the good news has not been truly delivered.  Unable to believe in the forgiveness of their Father in heaven, imagining him not at liberty to forgive, or incapable of forgiving forthright; not really believing him God our Saviour, but a God bound, either in his own nature or by a law above him and compulsory upon him, to exact some recompense or satisfaction for sin, a multitude of teaching men have taught their fellows that Jesus came to bear our punishment and save us from hell.  They have represented a result as the object of his mission—­the said result nowise to be desired by true man save as consequent on the gain of his object.  The mission of Jesus was from the same source and with the same object as the punishment of our sins.  He came to work along with our punishment.  He came to side with it, and set us free from our sins.  No man is safe from hell until he is free from his sins; but a man