PROXIMITY OF TRUTH TO ERROR.
We have in a former article called attention to this remarkable fact in the Christian life—that sometimes the richest practical truths seem to be parted by only a narrow belt from very pernicious errors. For examples we adduced the truth that God dwells and energizes in us, and that we may be taught and led by his Spirit. We will take as our next example what for brevity's sake we may call, the anti-legal spirit. There is sometimes occasion to preach against legality. Christians need to be cautioned against bringing their activities under the influence of fear more than love—of conscience and conviction rather than love, gratitude and sympathy with Christ. No father could enjoy service rendered on this legal, unloving spirit; and still less could a husband endure the attentions of his wife, if no love appeared in them. Neither can our Divine Lord. The very thing he cares for is the love of our heart. In just so far as a legal spirit shuts off this, it is to be abjured. Of course, legality in the sense of seeking and expecting pardon of sin and final salvation on the ground of obedience to law, is utterly set aside in the gospel scheme. That notion is precisely no gospel at all. There is no glad tidings for sinners in it. We could have tried that scheme fully as well without any Christ. In both the respects named, therefore, there are things to be said against a certain use of the law. And so far forth, the anti-legal doctrine involves glorious truth. Blessed are they who teach us that love is more and better than fear, that a child-like spirit pleases God; that the confiding love of a wife best represents the spirit Christ's people should bear towards himself. They also are doing a great gospel work, who insist that the law must not supplant the gospel as the ground work of man's hope for pardon and heaven. But let there be a care lest too much be said against the law and things that should never be said at all. For close along side of the fields of truth here, lie the rocks and realms of error. It can not be well to break down a sacred regard for God's law. There can be no truth in representing real law as man's enemy. Legitimately used, the law of supreme love to God and love equal and impartial to our neighbor, is a blessed power in our world, and one which no human soul can afford to spare. We need it as a rule of life. We need it as a test of personal character. We can not dispense with it as a standard of holiness. Those who have swept it away have been melancholy memorials of theological folly, or rather, of the great practical mistake of dishonoring God's law in a vain attempt thereby to give more honor to his gospel. No piety can be healthy that does not practically honor and faithfully use the moral law. Yet men have sometimes leaned so hard against the abuses of the law as to disparage law itself. It is a somewhat narrow line—this one between using the law as a part of the gospel system and using it as a whole system of its own. The former, since there is a gospel, is our only wisdom; the latter were egregious folly. Analogous to this is that ancient discussion which has come down to us in Paul and James, about the relations of faith and of works respectively, to salvation. A strait and narrow Christian path in which you rest on faith in Christ and that only for pardon; use your faith moreover as a quickener and help in all well doing, and also take your well-doing as a test of the vitality of your faith. There are many professed Christians who make faith their excuse from good works, rather than their incentive thereto and strength therein; who strangely suppose that Christ's obedience is an ample substitute for the obedience of all the Christian world and that its merit can be so transferred to them as to avail them just as if it were all their own, and without either the spirit or the fact of obedience in themselves. Of this extreme we will not now speak particularly and indeed only to say that however much it may aim to honor Jesus Christ, it surely deals a terrible blow against his gospel as a power for holiness in our world. On the other hand there are Christians who almost make their works their Saviour—not to say also that there are some people (not Christians) in whose system there is no Christ at all—nothing but works which they would fain believe to be good. The narrow middle path we commend—Jesus the only power that redeems from the curse of a law broken by us fatally; and Jesus the only effective help in holy living; so that our faith in him shall work by love, constrain to new obedience, and beget by its constant energy upon us, a new life. We adduce one more delicate Christian line, off which men swerve oft times into sad mistakes; viz. Sympathy with God's justice. It is a high Christian attainment to enter deeply into sympathy with God's justice, unswerved on the one hand by sympathy with sinners who may be of our own blood; and yet with no damage to our deep pity and love for their souls. On the one hand we are tempted to recoil from the horrors and woes of that awful doom to which justice must consign the incorrigible; on the other hand we are perhaps equally tempted, when our sensitive souls feel the oppression and smart of their sins, to give dangerous scope to indignation and wrath and to wonder how God can bear with them so patiently and so long. Now it is a blessed truth that we are held to sympathize with God's justice in precisely what it does, so far and so fast as that is revealed to us. We may not, we must not sit in judgment on that justice. Perhaps we cannot fathom its reasons; but we can trust God. It were all perilous in us to withhold our confidence and to doubt whether God is good in his justice. Scarcely less perilous is it for us to attempt to define the path God's justice may or may not take, and say so far I can honor him as just, and no farther. Over against this lies the other extreme—getting ahead of the King of kings, and impetuously hastening him on in our heart to swifter or direr judgments on the wicked. Some persons assume great credit to themselves for their intense indignation against those sins which have terribly goaded their own souls. Let them take care lest they usurp a prerogative not their own. It is well that Jehovah has said, "Vengeance is mine, I will repay." Let us never forget this, and never cease to thank him for excusing us from this responsibility. It may be a narrow path to hold our hearts in sympathy with what God does as fast as he does it, and yet not ever suffering our feelings to run in advance of his long delayed retributions. Let us never forget that God does not ask our wisdom in those great questions of the sinner's final doom. Being altogether competent to decide them all alone, there was no occasion that he should. He does not even encourage us to bring our own feelings into court to bear upon the decision one way or the other. He would have it suffice for us to abide his decisions, confiding in their wisdom and goodness and no less in the set time for their execution.—Oberlin Evangelist.