Can any thing show more than this what a mysterious evil sin is, that it is an offence against God, an assault upon His throne, an attack upon His life, an evil all but infinite? All the other expressions of the evil of sin, the cries of misery which it has wrung from its victims, the warnings which natural reason has uttered against it, the tender lamentations with which the saints have bewailed it, the penalties with which God has threatened to visit it, all pale before the announcement that God sent His Son into the world to die for it. I do not wonder that, as the evangelist tells us, the multitudes who came together at the sight of our Saviour's crucifixion returned smiting their breasts. Oh, what an awakening of stupefied consciences there must have been that day! How many, who came out in the morning careless and thoughtless, went back to the city with anxious hearts, with a secret grief and fear within they had never felt before. I suppose that even the scribes and Pharisees, who had plotted our Saviour's death, felt, for the moment at least, a guilty fear. Why, even Judas, when he saw what he had done, repented, and went and hanged himself saying: "I have sinned in that I have betrayed the innocent blood." And this book of the Passion has been ever since the source from which penitents have drawn their best motives for conversion, and saints their strongest impulses to perfection. Here, on the cross, is the root of that uncompromising and awful doctrine about sin--the doctrine, I mean, that sin is in no case whatever to be allowed, that even the smallest sin for the greatest result can never be permitted; that it is an evil far greater than can be spoken or imagined; that it must never be trifled with, or made light of; that it is to be shunned with the greatest horror, and avoided, if need be, even at the cost of our life--which has always been so essential a part of Christianity. {338}