) The more he looks for peace 'this way, his
guilt', like a heavy burden, becomes more intolerable; when he becomes
'dead' to the 'law',--as to 'any dependence upon it for
salvation',--by the body of Christ, and married to him, who was raised
from the dead, then, and not till then, his heart is set at liberty,
to run the way of God's commandments."
Here we are taught that the 'conscience' can never find relief from
obedience to the law of the Gospel.
False. We are told by Bunyan and his editors that the conscience can
never find relief for its disobedience to the Law in the Law
itself;--and this is as true of the moral as of the Mosaic Law. I am not
defending Calvinism or Bunyan's theology; but if victory, not truth,
were my object, I could desire no easier task than to defend it against
our doughty Barrister. Well, but I repent--that is, regret it!--Yes! and
so you doubtless regret the loss of an eye or arm:--will that make it
grow again?--Think you this nonsense as applied to morality? Be it so!
But yet nonsense most tremendously suited to human nature it is, as the
Barrister may find in the arguments of the Pagan philosophers against
Christianity, who attributed a large portion of its success to its
holding out an expiation, which no other religion did. Read but that
most affecting and instructive anecdote selected from the Hindostan
Missionary Account by the Quarterly Review. [4] Again let me say I am
not giving my own opinion on this very difficult point; but of one thing
I am convinced, that the 'I am sorry for it, that's enough'--men mean
nothing but regret when they talk of repentance, and have consciences
either so pure or so callous, as not to know what a direful and strange
thing remorse is, and how absolutely a fact 'sui generis'! I have often
remarked, and it cannot be too often remarked (vain as this may sound),
that this essential heterogeneity of regret and remorse is of itself a
sufficient and the best proof of free will and reason, the co-existence
of which in man we call conscience, and on this rests the whole
superstructure of human religion--God, immortality, guilt, judgment,
redemption.
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