Faith Without Repentance.
"I do not care for what I have done in the past," says a letter before us; "I trust in the blood, and Jesus has paid it all." But the conduct of the past had been criminal and abominable, and the fact that the writer was indifferent to it because he supposed that Christ had borne the penalty, and that he was free and safe from the consequences of his conduct, is the best evidence possible that he would do the same thing again if he could do it with impunity. The man had been taught by some one who did not understand the nature of salvation. The vicarious sacrifice is stigmatized as the "commercial theory of the atonement," chiefly because it has thus been travestied by those who profess to understand and teach it. No soul is pardoned until from grief over and hatred of its sin it turns from it with a full purpose and endeavor to lead a pure and righteous life. The redeemed soul will never cease to be ashamed in the memory of a mean act that it has committed, whether that act be toward God or man. Those hymns and homilies which represent the saved as glorying in their lives before supposed conversion, are misleading and mischievous. It is setting vice up as virtue to extol depravity as a back-ground necessary to magnify God's mercy. Repentance is not a part of a bargain, or of a shrewd speculation by which a wicked man imposes on the generosity and good nature of God. The test of its genuineness is nothing else than hatred of sin because of its moral repulsiveness, and love of righteousness for its own sake. The theologians who instruct gallows saints how to preach when the rope is about their necks, and that pernicious clerical liberalist, and all liberalists like him, who apologized for the murder of Mr. Cram, and promised the homicide-suicide a new probation under better conditions—such preachers need indoctrination in that hard-headed little summary, the Shorter Catechism. The contempt and ridicule which are heaped upon such performances by the rationalistic press are fully deserved, but we protest against accrediting such immoral sentimentality to evangelical religion.—Interior.