How Shall God Be Satisfied? [excerpt]

     Love that suffers suffers in sympathy with some [147][148] other. God, laboring and suffering to save the little finite—namely, Thyself—suffered not only from the sting of thy ingratitude and disobedience, but far more in his sympathy with thy suffering. Every pang of the bypath, and every briar, gave out, and drove home, not one sting, but two. Thou thinkest, O man! that thou canst sin and take the consequences. What a fool thou art! If thou couldst, then the cross were a murder and the universe a lie. Thou canst take a fragment of the pang, but on the universe is the deeper mark. It is in thy mother’s heart, and thy father’s; it is in the village of thy residence, in the State where thou art a citizen, in the world that quivers a little when thy sin is launched. Czolgosz can die in the chair, but America bears the pang of his bullet as a scar in eighty million hearts. Bear the consequences? So little does this fool with his careless sin know what is the purport of this rash, foolish act that unorders the world!