But the great difficulty is that so many fail to see what Divine Love and human sin involve when they come together. It has superficially been assumed that if God is a loving Father He will lightly overlook sin and cannot be hard upon the sinner. They catch at a soft view of sin and patch up a rose water theory of its cure. This soft view has appealed to those who like an easy religion, and it has often driven the evangelical Christian to an opposite extreme, which finds no support in the Gospel. To arrive at a deeper view we must go back to Christ and go down into the deeps of love as we know it in actual human life. True love is never weak and thin, and unconcerned about the character of the beloved. The father does not “lay aside” his love when he punishes his erring boy, and keeps him impressed with the reality of moral distinctions. It is the father’s intense love which wields the rod. All true corrections and chastisements flow out of love. Even Dante knew this, when he wrote on the door of Hell, “Love was my maker.” It is an ignorant and mushy love that cannot rise above kisses and sugar plums, and it is extremely superficial to set up a schism between love and justice. But that is not all. Love always involves vicarious suffering. Love is an organic principle. It carries with it the necessity of sharing life with other persons, and in a world of imperfect persons, it means not only sharing gains and triumphs, it means, too, sharing losses and defeats. No man can sin in a sin-tight compartment. Suffer for his own sin the sinner assuredly will. But he does not stop there. Many innocent persons will suffer for it, too. This is one of the tragic aspects of life which has baffled many a lone sufferer like Job. Those who are nearest and closest to the sufferer will suffer most, but his sin has endless possibilities of causing suffering upon persons far remote in time and space. That ancient figure of the ripples from the little pebble, which sends rings to the farthest shores of the sea, is not overdrawn. Not one of us can estimate the havoc of his sin, or forecast the trail of suffering which it will leave behind it. So long as life remains organic there will be vicarious suffering. But that is only one side of life. Holiness also involves a like suffering. There are no holiness-tight compartments. No man can be holy unto himself. Just as far as he has any rag of holiness he must share it--he must feel himself a debtor to others who lack--he must take up the task of making others holy. _That costs something._