The doctrine of justification by faith alone is so simple and self-evident to all Protestants, it has been so inculcated from the cradle, that it is difficult for us to realize how it struck the pious monks in the days of the Reformation. For it is a doctrine which the church of Rome has ever stamped as heresy. Rome teaches that men are saved, not by simple trust in the free mercy of God through Jesus Christ our Saviour, but by love and good works. We are pardoned, according to Roman Catholic theology, only when we become good. According to Protestant theology we become good only after we are pardoned. “Do this and live,” says Romanism. “Live that you may do this,” says Protestantism. “Do good that you may receive the grace of God,” says Romanism. “Accept the free grace of God, that you may be able to do good,” says Protestantism. “God does not forgive all your sins,” says Romanism, “he simply remits the external punishment. The rest you must balance by your penances or by your sufferings in purgatory.” When to one who has been taught this doctrine from his youth up, the truth first comes that God loves us for his own sake, not for our virtues or experiences or work, that he forgives us because he is love, and because for love’s sake he has sent his Son into the world to bear all our sins, it is a revelation whose wondrousness we can hardly realize. Perhaps a glance backward to the days when justification by faith only was a new disclosure, a resurrection of a long-entombed truth, would help us to realize how sublime a truth it is, and how transcendently it would appear to be to us if we had not become used to it. Many a man will travel hundreds of miles to see sights less grand than the sunrise through which he every morning sleeps. Many a man ransacks literature, and flits from preacher to preacher in search of some new truth, and is utterly indifferent to this sublimest truth of history or philosophy: “God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish but have everlasting life.”—Sel.