TRUE CHRISTIAN LIBERALITY.

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LIBERALITY, generosity, is essentially a Christian grace. God is love, and all who partake of his spirit must be proportionately loving and generous. But as we are instructed not to be wise in our own conceits, nor to be wise above what is written in God's Word, so likewise it is well for all true children of God to beware of assuming to have a greater, wider or deeper love than that clearly set forth in God's Word as the only real and true standard. God's people are to set up a standard neither for God nor for themselves; but as obedient children they should not fashion their minds and faith after their own defective conceptions, but according as the Lord has revealed.

Some err on one side of this question and some on the other; but the remedy for both errors is the same--submit your heads and your hearts unto the direction of the Lord through his inspired Word.

That Word nowhere teaches that everlasting torment is the wages of sin, but that the wages of sin is death. Every plain (non-symbolic) statement of the Scriptures agrees that "the soul that sinneth, it shall die." Surely, then, no one is justified in maligning, yea, blaspheming God's character and plan by teaching directly or indirectly the contrary--that he will keep the sinner's soul alive to all eternity in order to torment it. There would be neither love nor justice in such a course.

The Scriptures do, indeed, teach that the great ransom-sacrifice given by our Redeemer will sooner or later bring to every member of the human family fullest opportunity for the recovery of all that he lost in Adam. But they forget that although Adam had life, its everlasting continuance was not assured: for this he was on trial when he wilfully sinned and thus cut short his trial and brought upon himself, and upon us in his loins, the sentence of death.