‘But the wicked? Ay, this is their very misery, that there is no peace to them. I want them to enter into my peace, and they will not. I am at peace with them, saith the Lord. I owe them no grudge, poor wretches. But they will not be at peace with themselves. They are like the troubled sea, which casts up mire and dirt, and fouls itself. I cast up no mire nor dirt. I foul nothing. I tempt no man. I, the good God, create no evil. If the troubled sea fouls itself, so do the wicked make themselves miserable, and punish themselves by their own lusts, which war in their members. But they cannot alter _me_, saith the Lord; they cannot change my temper, my character, my everlasting name. I am that I am, who inhabit eternity; and no creature, and no creature’s sin, can make me other than I am. And what is that? What is the name, what is the character, what is the temper of him who inhabits eternity? Look on the cross, and see. The cross, at least, will tell you what kind of a God your God is. A good God; a God of love; a God of boundless forbearance and long-suffering. Good God! The folly and madness of men’s hearts, who look on God dying on the cross for them, and begin forthwith puzzling their brains as to _how_ he died for them; how Christ’s blood washes away their sins; how it is applied, and to whom; puzzling their brains with theories of the atonement, and with predestination, and satisfaction, and forensic justification, and particular redemption, and long words which (four out of five of them) are not in the Bible, but are spun out of men’s own minds, as spiders’ webs are from spiders—and, like them, mostly fit to hamper poor harmless flies. How Christ’s death takes away thy sins, thou wilt never know on earth—perhaps not in heaven. It is a mystery which thou must believe and adore. But why he died, thou canst see at the first glance—if thou hast a human heart, and wilt look at what God means thee to look at—Christ upon his cross. He died because he was _love_—love itself—love boundless, unconquerable, unchangeable—love which inhabits eternity, and therefore could not be hardened or foiled by any sin or rebellion of man, but must love men still; must go out to seek and save them; must dare, suffer any misery, shame, death itself, for their sake; just because it is absolute and perfect love, which inhabits eternity. Look at that—look at the sight of God’s character, which the cross gives thee; and then, instead of being terrified at God’s will and decree being unchangeable and eternal, it will be the greatest possible comfort to thee that God’s will is unchangeable and eternal, because thou wilt see from the cross that it is a _good_ will—a will of mercy, forbearance, long-suffering towards thee and all mankind, eternal in the heavens as God himself.