I. First, it may be said what the unpardonable sin is not. It cannot be any sin from which men ever have repented; for wherever God has given repentance He has given pardon; no sin, therefore, which has ever been repented of is the unpardonable sin. And yet what very awful and exceeding sins have been pardoned or might have been pardoned. No course even of sin, no act of deadly sin, following even upon a course of sin, if it admits the pang of penitence, shuts out from pardon. What is really dead feels not. No past sin hinders from penitence. The faintest longing to love is love; the very dread to miss for ever the face of God is love; the very terror at that dreadful state where none can love is love.
II. And now to approach the sacred text itself. And here, because Satan would ever tempt to despair of God's mercy those whom he has tempted, through presuming upon it, to sin, our good Lord accompanies the awful sentence on that one sin which hath no forgiveness with the largest, almost boundless, assurance of mercy on all besides. The blasphemy against the Holy Ghost was not one sort of guilt, but many in one. It was the guilt of those who had the very presence of their Lord, who witnessed His love and holiness, who saw the power of God, but out of envy and malice obstinately resisted the light, and ascribed that which was the very working of the Spirit of Holiness to the unclean spirit. And this sin was in its very nature unpardonable, not because God would not pardon it upon repentance, but because it cut off repentance from itself, turning into sin the very miracles of mercy which should have drawn it to repentance.
III. For us is this fearful picture of completed disease given, that we may shun the very slightest taint and touch of its infecting breath. Let us labour, through God's grace, to grow in all other graces which are opposed to every trace and shade of deadly sin; let us pray for deeper awe, for truer penitence, for loving fear, for fearing love; so shall we, in the increase of our inward life, have the witness of His Spirit to us that we are not decaying unto death; so shall we, after this brief, weary struggle, enter our everlasting rest, behold the ever-living Truth, and by His all-pervading love, love Himself in Himself, and all in Him.
E. B. Pusey, Selected Occasional Sermons,p. 225.