SECOND NIGHT.
Sabbath evening again returned; and when the shutters were closed, and fresh wood had been piled on the fire, little Emma climbed on her grandmamma’s knee, and asked her to explain some more “Scripture doctrines.”
“I shall do so with pleasure, my child,” said Mrs Allan; “and I must ask you to give me to‐night your close attention, as I am going to speak to you about some very important and precious truths.”
Emma thanked her for her great kindness, in being at so much pains to instruct her; and her grandmamma thus began:—
|Of Justification.| “You will remember, my dear, that the Bible tells us we are all condemned by nature—in a lost and ruined state. In order to make us understand what this state is, it represents,—
|The Judge.| “God as a great Judge, ‘of purer eyes than to behold iniquity,’ and who cannot look upon sin.
|The Prisoner.| “It represents the sinner as standing at His bar, called to answer for his many thousand transgressions.
|The Witnesses.| “And, as in a court of earthly justice witnesses are brought in to condemn the prisoner, so Satan accuses the sinner—his own heart accuses him—God’s Law, which he has broken, accuses him.”
“And what more?” said Emma.
|The Sentence.| “These all,” said her grandmother, “pronounce the sinner ‘guilty’—the Holy Judge passes upon him a sentence of condemnation. Oh! how dreadful to think, that, if ‘out of Christ,’ we are at this moment in a condemned state! We have not to wait till a day of judgment to have the sentence pronounced upon us. The Bible tells us we are ‘condemned already,’ and that ‘the wrath of God abideth upon us.’ We are, as it were, shut up in a condemned cell; the kindness and clemency of our Judge alone delaying the execution of the awful sentence!”