some great earthly blessing, may you not, as a believer, reason, Would God have given me this, and not given me the pardon of my sins? I do not, of course, mean that every one who has bestowed upon him some good worldly thing is therefore necessarily a partaker of divine grace. But this I say,Supposing a man to have that anxiety about his soul which makes him wish for pardon,—supposing him really to desire that the one gift may be the token of the other,— then is not the inference a fair one? And more than this, is not it a very right and a very pleasant use, the very best use we can make of any kind Providence in outward things, to accept it as a mark that God loves and has mercy upon our souls ? What a happy thing it would be to go about seeing in every blessing which falls to us—even in every beauty of nature that the eye looks upon,-in the song of the bird, or the tints of the landscape-another and another seal of our forgiveness and our peace! But the great point to which I wish to draw your attention, this morning, is the power which is given to Christ upon earth to forgive sins. It is to Christ as "the Son of Man" that this is given. It were much less if He had it as God. But now, in that the Father has consigned it to the Son, we have the two securities which make the two rests of the mind. The Father gives my pardon to me through Christ ;-Christ gives my pardon to me from the Father. So both the Father and the Son are my sureties, and I hold that anchor of my hope by two immutable things, two chains which can never be broken,— the holiness of the Father, and the faithfulness of the Son. There is a beautiful justice too, in the fact that He who purchased the pardon, at such an untold price of suffering, should be the One to whom it is permitted to have the joy of giving it. While to us, it comes in all the power of the sympathy, not of a sinner, but of everything short of a sinner-of One who is our flesh and blood, when we receive that most precious of all gifts, which is the pledge of every other, at the hand, not of an Eternal Spirit, or an unseen or an inconceivable God,-but at the hand of "the Son of Man." I can realize the Giver as well as the gift, and I can associate it sweetly with His Person and His love. Heaven itself would be less, comparatively, heaven would be as nothing, if we could climb to it by our own efforts or goodness,—or if we owed it to anything else in the whole world but to "the Son of Man." It is not wonderful that a doctrine so blessed as this power of the Son of Man to forgive all sins should be abused. There are those, who, in the expression, "The Son of Man"-forgetting that it is the name by which He almost always called Himself, though His disciples, in their reverence to Him, never used it—have thought that they see a warrant for priestly absolution. And they argue, Christ said "the Son of Man hath power on earth to forgive sins," to show that after His death, when He was gone, He would give and delegate that power to sons of men. It must be a weak cause which needs to prop itself on anything so simply ingenious! At the moment when our blessed Lord said the words, the apostles were all standing by; and He did His own work, in His own solitude, to His own glory. And if you will be at the pains to trace the way in which, in the Acts of the Apostles, i.e., in the only certain authority which we have upon the way the apostles ever dealt with the pardon of sin, you will see that they always did exactly the same thing; they stood by, and they let Christ pardon in the solitude of His sovereignty. "Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ, for the remission of sins." "Repent ye therefore, and be converted, that your sins may be blotted out, when the times of refreshing shall come from the presence of the Lord." "He shall send Jesus Christ, which before was preached unto you." "Him hath God exalted to be a Prince and a Saviour, to give repentance and remission of sins." "Through this man is preached unto you the forgiveness of sins.” Repent, therefore, of this thy wickedness, and pray God, if perhaps the thought of thy heart may be forgiven thee." Those are the only instances. This, then, is the manner in which the apostles themselves always acted with sins which were felt and confessed. There is not a single instance in the Acts of the Apostles of what is commonly called absolution. They never said, "Thy sins are forgiven thee." They left all forgiveness just where our Church does,-a contingent thing, i.e., dependent upon the faith and repentance of which God only, in His omniscience, is Judge. Thus, as much as on that day at Capernaum, they stand by, and they let Christ do His own. work in the plenitude of His own unapproachable power. Let every man beware how he trespass on that exclusive prerogative of the Son of Man! It may be, and it sometimes is, a real help and comfort to a burdened soul to come and lay open its grief and sin to a minister of God. And when the minister, having had the whole case submitted to him, in the modest use of "the keys" with which he is entrusted, assures that pardoned man that upon the acknowledgment of his guilt and his trust in Jesus, God will, God does, God has forgiven him, it is to be believed that that word of truth, that message from God, may and will come with greater power to the conscience, to relieve it and comfort it, than it would have done without that ministration, or at the mouth of any other man who had not received the like commission to absolve. And this is that which we mean in that disputed word—“ that He hath given to His ministers power and commandment to pronounce to His people the pardon of their sins." But beyond this, the Church claims and knows no absolving power. It merely points the finger to Christ, and says, "There stands the Son of Man; we are nothing, nothing; He does all, 'The Son of Man,'-and the Son of Man alone, hath power on earth to forgive sins."" And even this absolution of the Church is not necessary to the completest conviction of the cancelling of any sin. And the Liturgy emphatically makes the absolution, which rests upon individual confession, a last resource for those who "cannot by any other means quiet their own conscience therein." There is no intermediate step to the place between a penitent and his forgiveness. We have not a Saviour so far off. Straight from the soul the confession goes up to Christ, and straight from Christ the pardon comes down to the soul. The Son of Man stands in the midst of this hospital world, where every creature is paralyzed with sin, even to death, and if any poor soul creeps to His feet, the will, the grace, the power is all there, it wants no intervention, no priest, no angel, no sacrament, no instrument, human or divine,—but all in - heaven and earth stand by and are silent, while Jesus speaks alone, "Son, be of good cheer, thy sins are forgiven "For the Son of Man hath power on earth to for thee." And in those words "on earth," I read the blessed promise that so long as this earth shall last, more and more wicked though it grow every day, and however many have already washed themselves in the fountain of that grace, even to the end, that unwearied presence is here, that love is free, and that authority is absolute, as it was in Galilee; He will never leave this earth while it is an earth, but He will be always here to do His own forgiving work, for "the Son of Man hath power on earth to forgive sins." Then why, brethren, why should there be in this church this morning, an unforgiven man? Why should any carry on with him through this week that heaviest of all burdens-the fear, the doubt, whether his sins are pardoned? Why that doubt, when the relief is so close, the remedy so simple, the virtue so infallible," The Son of Man hath power on earth to forgive sins." Why? Is it that you have not sufficiently honored the Second Person in the ever-blessed Trinity in this matter? Is it that you have not treated it as equally the attribute of Christ to give the pardon as you have to purchase it? The Holy Ghost, indeed, must apply to it the conscience, and the Father must authorize it; but it is the Son who gives, as well as who buys pardon. Do you ask Him, distinctively Him. Now when I speak this morning of this forgiveness of sins, I am not wandering far from the especial subject of the saint whose day we are keeping. For, indeed, there is no medicine, even for the body, like the quiet of a mind |