sent." I will not attempt now to draw out all that is included in that familiar phrase, Believing in the Lord Jesus Christ: what duties it reveals, what motives it inspires. But to you, who know who He was and what He has done for you, and to whom the privilege is offered of being partners in His work, I will say, in the Apostle's words"See that you receive not the grace of God in vain."

XVIII

THE FORGIVENESS OF SINS

"And such were some of you but ye are washed, but ye are sanctified, but ye are justified in the name of the Lord Jesus, and by the Spirit of our God."—I CORINTHIANS vi. II.

THE earliest opponents of Christianity gave themselves little trouble to inform themselves about the tenets of the religion which they persecuted, and consequently a good deal of the first apologies written in defence of our religion has but a historic interest for us, being taken up with a refutation of idle calumnies which nobody now imagines to have ever had any foundation in truth. But when the head of the Roman empire became a professor of the new creed, it was no longer possible to treat its claims as unworthy of examination. Educated heathen made themselves acquainted with Christian literature, and a new generation of philosophic opponents of our faith drew from their study of our sacred books objections which have not lost their vitality in our own days.

Among other passages of the New Testament against which objections were brought, that which I have read as the text was fastened on by a heathen who lived at the end of the fourth century.1 "Such were some of you," he cries. "Let us hear what 'such' means: Fornicators, idolaters, effeminate, abusers of themselves with mankind, thieves, covetous, drunkards, revilers, extortioners.' Yet having thus stained themselves with pollutions innumerable and abominable, by merely being baptized and calling on the name of Christ they are freed from all their guilt as easily as a snake casts its slough. Who, then, would not venture on all wickedness, mentionable or unmentionable, if he knew that he had but to believe and be baptized, and could then get pardon for the most abominable deeds from Him who shall judge the quick and the dead. This is downright encouragement to sin; this overturns all discipline and all law; this teaches the impious man to feel no terror, if by merely being baptized he can clear away a mass of ten thousand iniquities."

The same text had been also laid hold of by the Emperor Julian.2 He enumerates in like manner the sins from which Paul's disciples had

1 Macarius Magnes, Apocritica, iv. 19.
2 Cyr. Alex., Cont. Jul. vii.

The

been washed, and scoffs at the idea that the baptismal water, which is unable to wash away leprosy, which cannot cleanse away gout or dysentery, which cannot take away even warts or whitlows or the very smallest disease of the body, should be supposed capable of penetrating to the soul and washing away adulteries, extortions, and all its other sins. The immorality of the Christian doctrine of the forgiveness of sins became a stock topic with heathen writers, who threw their objection into its most popular form in the myth which they circulated concerning the conversion of Constantine. Emperor, their story went, being tormented with remorse for his many crimes, in particular for the murder of his wife and his son, consulted a philosopher of the school of Plotinus, by what lustral purifications he could be cleansed from his guilt. But this philosopher had the honesty to tell him that no purifications could avail to cleanse moral defilement such as his. The Emperor was grieved at his repulse, but afterwards fell in with some Christian bishops (Hosius of Corduba is said to have been principally intended) who told him that their baptism could obliterate the deepest stains of sin, and so Constantine eagerly sought at the hands of this new superstition a pardon which his older re

ligious guides had been too pure and too true to promise.1

Thinking, as we have good reason to do, of heathen morality, we naturally feel some little amused surprise at the courage of the heathen advocates who challenged comparison of their doctrines with those of the Christians in respect of their moral tendencies. But the fact that it was as late as the fourth century before this line was taken may rather entitle us to set down among the benefits conferred by Christianity its indirect influence in elevating the moral conceptions even of those who did not embrace the religion. For the earlier objections to the new religion were not on account of the laxity of its morality, but on account of its puritanical overstrictness. "They think it strange," says St. Peter, "that ye run not with them to the same excess of riot." Tertullian, writing a couple of

centuries before the heathen authors whom I have already cited, quotes as unwilling testimony to the purity of Christian morality, the lamentations which the unconverted used to raise over their former companions in riot who had been spoiled" by Christianity. "What a jolly boon companion that young man was, and now he is good for nothing: he has become a Christian."

¢

1 Zosimus, ii. 29; Soz. H. E. i. 5.