But beyond considerations of the context, other reasons conclusively negative such an interpretation of this text.  I, for my part, do not believe that there are any bounds or end to God’s forbearing pleading with men in this life.  I take, as true, the great words of the old Psalm, in their simplest sense—­’His mercy endureth for ever’; and I fall back upon the other words which a penitent had learned to be true by reflecting on the greatness of his own sin:  ’With Him are multitudes of redemptions’; and I turn from psalmists and prophets to the Master who showed us God’s heart, and knew what He spake when He laid it down as the law and the measure of human forgiveness which was moulded upon the pattern of the divine, that it should be ’seventy times seven’—­the multiplication of both the perfect numbers into themselves—­than which there can be no grander expression for absolute innumerableness and unfailing continuance.

No, no! men may say to God, ‘Speak no more to us’; or they may get so far away from Him, as that they only hear God’s pleading voice, dim and faint, like a voice in a dream.  But surely the history of His progressive revelation shows us that, rather than such abandonment of the worst, the law of the divine dealing is that the deafer the man, the more piercing the voice beseeching and warning.  The attraction of gravitation decreases as distance increases, but the further away we are from Him, the stronger is the attraction which issues from Him, and would draw us to Himself.

Clear away, then, altogether out of your minds any notion that there is here declared what, in my judgment, is not declared anywhere in the Bible, and never occurs in the divine dealings with men.  Be sure that He never ceases to seek to draw the most obstinate, idolatrous, and rebellious heart to Himself.  That divine charity ’suffereth long, and is kind’ ... ‘hopeth all things, and beareth all things.’

Again, let me point out that the words of my text do not enjoin the cessation of the efforts of Christian people for the recovery of the most deeply sunken in sin.  ‘Let him alone’ is a commandment, and it is a commandment to God’s Church, but it is not a commandment to despair of any that they may be brought into the fold, or to give up efforts to that end.  If our Father in heaven never ceases to bear in His heart His prodigal children, it does not become those prodigals, who have come back, to think that any of their brethren are too far away to be drawn by their loving proclamation of the Father’s heart of love.

There is the glory of our Gospel, that, taking far sadder, graver views of what sin and alienation from God are, than the world’s philosophers and philanthropists do, it surpasses them just as much as in the superb confidence with which it sets itself to the cure of the disease as in the unflinching clearness with which it diagnoses the disease as fatal, if it be not dealt with by the all-healing Gospel.  All