Alas, alas! such people
forget that sin leaves behind it wounds, which even the grace of
Christ takes a long time in healing, and which then remain as ugly,
but wholesome scars, to remind us of the fools which we have been.
They are like a man who is in great bodily agony, and gets sudden
relief from a dose of laudanum. The pain stops; and he feels
himself, as he says, in heaven for the time: but he is too apt to
forget that the cause of the pain is still in his body, and that if
he commits the least imprudence, he will bring it back again; just
as happens, I hear, in too many of these hasty and noisy conversions
now-a-days.
That is one extreme. The opposite extreme is that of many old Roman
Catholic saints and hermits who could not forgive themselves at all,
but passed their whole lives in fasting, poverty, and misery,
bewailing their sins till their dying day. That was a mistake. It
sprang out of mistaken doctrines, of which I shall not speak here:
but it did not spring entirely from them. There was in them a seed
of good, for which I shall always love and honour them, even though
I differ from them; and that was, a noble hatred of sin. They felt
the sinfulness of sin; and they hated themselves for having sinned.
The mercy of God made them only the more ashamed of themselves for
having rebelled against him.
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