Divine Justice and Pardon Reconciled.
There are two extreme tendencies in human sentiment respecting God from which a devout and thoughtful heart shrinks with equal repugnance: a religion which begins with fear and a religion which ends without it. On the one hand is the passionate faith of remorse, which throws the shade of its own despair upon the universe of God, lies prostrate in the dark cell of alienation, and declares that if no mediator interpose, there is no hope or respite from the curse of inexorable law; on the other is the creed of lenient good-nature, which spreads the light of its mild indifference over all things, considers the sins of men as chiefly venial frailties, is pleased with its own tolerance, and trusts that Heaven will overlook what it must have foreseen and did not think it worth while to prevent.
I. It is a hard thing for our narrow mind to take in the infinite harmony of Divine perfection. Our conscience and our affections make incompatible demands on God. We require for our support that He be faithful; we look for our comfort's sake that He be tender too. If compassion be impossible to God, it is strange that He has implanted any in us; for He has more reason to pity us, than we can have to pity one another, we gazing in the face of an equal and a brother, He looking from His serene almightiness down upon our nature, tempted, sorrowing, struggling, dying. No, it is as much a part of perfection to receive the penitent as to reprove the sin, unless the noblest impulse of the human soul seeks vainly for its image and prototype in Him.
II. But how, you will ask, can both these things be? How can God at once swerve no hairbreadth from His threatened punishment, and yet be ever ready to forgive? Rightly to understand this, we must mark the distinction between His interior nature and His external government, between what He is in Himself and what He has written out and proclaimed in the legislation of the universe. Not all that dwells in His thought and lives in His heart has He put forth; and, vast as is the field and sublime the record of creation, solemn as we find the path of life, and awful the insight of His conscience, these are but a part of His ways; and there is yet a hiding-place of His thunder that none can understand. Everything to Him is infinite, and all the splendours of His revelation in the old earth and in the older sky, and on the heart of humanity, and even in the unique life of the Man of sorrows, are but a few faint lines of light, streaking the surface of immensity. Within the realm of law and nature He is inexorable, and has put the freedom of pity quite away; and as the Atlantic storm turns not aside to avoid the ship where sanctity or genius is afloat, so neither does the tempest of justice falter and pause to spare the head uplifted in repentant prayer. But it is otherwise in respect to the soul and person of the sinner himself: the sentiments of God towards him are not bound; and if, while the deed of the past is an irrevocable transgression, the temper of the present is one of surrender and return, there is nothing to sustain the Divine aversion or hinder the outflow of infinite pity.
J. Martineau, Hours of Thought,vol. i., p. 102.