Precious record! may every anxious sinner read it with the eye of faith. It is a record which must impart settled peace to the heart. God has been satisfied as to sin. This is enough for me. Here my guilty, troubled conscience finds sweet repose. I have seen my sins rising like a dark mountain before me, threatening me with eternal wrath; but the blood of Jesus has blotted them all out from God's view. They are gone, and gone forever--sunk as lead into the mighty waters of divine forgetfulness, and I am free--as free as the One who was nailed to the cross for my sins, but who is now on the throne without them. Such, then, is the ground of divine forgiveness. What a solid ground! Who or what can touch it? Justice _has_ owned it. The troubled conscience _may_ rest in it. Satan _must_ acknowledge it. God has revealed Himself as a Justifier, and faith walks in the light and power of that revelation. Nothing can be simpler, nothing clearer, nothing more satisfactory. If God reveals Himself as a Justifier, then I am justified through faith in the revelation. When the moral glories of the cross shine upon the sinner, he sees and knows, believes and owns, that the One who has judged his sins in death, has justified him in resurrection. Anxious reader, see, I beseech thee, that thou apprehendest the true ground of the forgiveness of sins. There is no use in our proceeding to consider the _extent_ and _style_ until thy poor troubled conscience has been led to rest upon the imperishable _ground_ of forgiveness. Let me reason with thee. What is to hinder thee, from this very moment, resting on the foundation of accomplished atonement? Say, does thy conscience need something more to satisfy it than that which satisfied the inflexible justice of God? Is not the ground on which God reveals Himself as a righteous Justifier sufficiently strong for thee to stand upon as a justified sinner? What sayest thou, friend? Art thou satisfied? Is Christ sufficient for thee? Art thou still searching for something in thyself, thy ways, thy works, thy thoughts, thy feelings? If so, give up the search as utterly vain. Thou wilt never find any thing. And even though thou couldst find something, it would only be an encumbrance, a loss, a hindrance. Christ is sufficient for God, let Him be sufficient for thee likewise. Then--but not until then--wilt thou be truly happy. May God the Holy Ghost cause thee to rest, this moment, upon an all-sufficient sacrifice, as the only ground of divine forgiveness, so that thou mayest be able to enter, with real intelligence and interest, upon the examination of the second point in our subject, namely,-- THE EXTENT OF DIVINE FORGIVENESS. Very many are perplexed as to this. They do not see the fullness of the atonement; they do not grasp the emancipating fact of its application to all their sins; they do not enter into the full force of those lines, which perhaps they often sing,--