With our Evangelicalism, Tractarianism, Scribeism, Pharisaism, we have ceased to front the _living fact_--we are as zealous as Scribes and Pharisees ever were for negatives; but in the meantime Human Nature, oppressed and overborne, gasping for breath, demands something real and living. It cannot live on controversies. It cannot be fed on protests against heresy, however vehement. We are trying who can protest loudest. Every book, every journal, rings with warnings. "Beware!" is written upon everything. Beware of Rome; beware of Geneva; beware of Germany; some danger on every side; Satan everywhere--God _nowhere_; everywhere some man to be shunned or dreaded--nowhere one to be loved freely and without suspicion. Is it any wonder if men and women, in the midst of negations, cry, "Ye warn me from the error, but who will guide me into truth? I want guidance. I am sinful, full of evil! I want forgiveness! Absolve me; tell me that I am pardoned; help me to believe it. Your quarrels do not help me; if you cannot do _that_, it matters little what you _can_ do. You have restricted God's love, and narrowed the path to heaven; you have hampered religion with so many mysterious questions and quibbles that I cannot find the way to God; you have terrified me with so many snares and pitfalls on every side, that I dare not tread at all. Give me peace; give me human guidance: I want a human arm to lean on." This is a cry, I believe, becoming daily more passionate, and more common. And no wonder that all our information, public and private, is to the same effect--that the recent converts have found peace in Rome; for the secret of the power of Rome is this--that she grounds her teaching, not on variable feelings and correct opinions, but on _facts_. God is not a highly probable God, but a _fact_. God's forgiveness is not a feeling, but a _fact_; and a material symbolic fact is the witness of the invisible one. Rome puts forward her absolution--her false, priestly, magical absolution--a visible fact, as a witness of the invisible. And her perversion prevails because founded on a truth. II. The power of the positive truth. Is it any wonder, if taught on every side distrust of man, the heart should by a violent reaction, and by an extravagant confidence in a priest, proclaim that its normal, natural state is not distrust, but trust? What is forgiveness?--It is God reconciled to us. What is absolution?--It is the authoritative declaration that God is reconciled. Authoritative: that is a real power of conveying a sense and feeling of forgiveness. It is the power of the Son of Man _on earth_ to forgive sins. It is man, God's image, representing, by his forgiveness on earth, God's forgiveness in heaven.