It is of extreme difficulty to _understand_ the clause, says Mr. Ruskin. Replies some slow-witted preacher: "Where is the difficulty? I both understand it and explain it with perfect ease!" What! understand the precious conditions on which forgiveness will be extended to us! The question of God's forgiveness is not a _simple_ question. It is complicated by its relation to men's mutual forgiveness of each other, and that again by the practical difficulty of knowing when we can, and when, from the very nature of the case, we cannot, forgive. Here are surely elements of difficulty quite sufficient to justify the remark that "the clause is one of such difficulty that, to understand it, means almost to know the love of God which passeth knowledge." But we may, at any rate, guard our people against _misunderstanding_ it; and they are guilty, and full of guilt, who live in sin,--sins of avarice, of ill temper, of calumny, of hatred, of sensuality, and of unforgivingness, and yet daily ask to be forgiven, because, forsooth, they are innocent of any bad intention! No man or woman who sins with the knowledge that it _is_ sin can have God's forgiveness. It is no use to plead the frailty of the flesh. It is wilful, knowing, deliberate sin; and it will not be forgiven without a very living, earnest, and working faith indeed. I question much whether we preachers of the Gospel say enough upon this point,--not at all that we underrate its importance, nor that we overrate the importance of that which we are apt to call Gospel preaching [Greek: kat' exochên], namely, the doctrine of the atonement by the Blood of Christ, which is the brightness and glory of the Gospel message, but is no more all of it than that the sum of the Lord's Prayer is contained in one of its clauses.