When a man acknowledges the right he denied before; when he says to the wrong, “I abjure, I loathe you; I see now what you are; I could not see it before because I would not; God forgive me; make me clean, or let me die!” then justice, that is God, has conquered—and not till then... 

Sin and punishment are in no antagonism to each other in man, any more than pardon and punishment are in God; they can perfectly co-exist. The one naturally follows the other. Sin and suffering are not opposites; the opposite of evil is good, not suffering; the opposite of sin is not suffering, but righteousness. The path across the gulf that divides right from wrong is not the fire, but repentance. ..

Physical suffering may be a factor in rousing this mental pain; but “I would I had never been born!” must be the cry of Judas, not because of the hell-fire around him, but because he loathes the man that betrayed his friend, the world’s friend. When a man loathes himself, he has begun to be saved...

God is not bound to punish sin; he is bound to destroy it. If he were not the Maker, he might not be bound to destroy sin; but seeing he has created creatures who have sinned, and therefore sin has, by the creating act of God, come into the world, God is, in his own righteousness, bound to destroy sin...

Why does God punish sin? Because sin itself deserves punishment? Then how can he tell us to forgive it?

If it be said by any that God does a thing which seems to me unjust, then either I do not know what the thing is, or God does not do it. If, for instance, it be said that God visits the sins of the fathers on the children, a man who takes visits upon to mean punishes, and the children to mean the innocent children, ought to say, “Either I do not understand the statement, or the thing is not true, whoever says it..." 

Where an evil thing is invented to explain and account for a good thing, and a lover of God is called upon to believe the invention or be cast out, he need not mind being cast out, for it is into the company ofJesus. ..

Who would say a man was a just man because he insisted on prosecuting every offender? A scoundrel might do that. Punishment of the guilty may be involved in justice, but it does not constitute the justice of God one atom more than it would constitute the justice of a man...

Even without the material rectification of a wrong when that is impossible, repentance removes the offence which no suffering could. I should even feel that the gift the thief had made me, giving into my heart a repentant brother, was infinitely beyond the restitution of what he had taken from me... 

The punishing of the wrong-doer makes no atonement for the wrong done...

The law itself may be unjust, or the working of the law may be foiled by the parasites of law for their own gain,. But even if the law is good, and thoroughly administered, it does not necessarily follow that justice is done...

Is every Christian expected to bear witness? A man content to bear no witness to the truth is not in the kingdom of heaven. One who believes must bear witness. One who sees the truth, must live witnessing to it. Is our life, then, a witnessing to the truth? 

Little thought the sons of Zebedee and their ambitious mother what the earthly throne of Christ’s glory was which they and she begged they might share... 

Iam daring to present a shadow of the Lord’s witnessing, a shadow surely cast by his deeds and his very words! If I mistake, he will forgive me. I fear only lest I should fail of witnessing, and myself be, after all, no king, but a talker; no disciple of Jesus, ready to go with him to the death, but an arguer about the truth...

The Lord is saying, “I have been from all eternity the son of him from whom you issue, and whom you call your father, but whom you will not have your father: I know all he thinks and is; and I say this, that my perfect freedom, my pure individuality, rests on the fact that I have not another will than his...
 

Neither Pilate nor the superficial Christian asks the one true question, “How am I to be a true man? How am I to become a man worth being a man?” ...

What then is the kingdom over which the Lord cares to reign, for he says he came into the world to be a king? I answer, a kingdom of kings, and no other. Where every man is a king, there only does the Lord care to reign, in the name of his father... 

Pilate asks Jesus if he is a king. The question is called forth by what the Lord has just said concerning his kingdom, closing with the statement that it is not of this world. He now answers Pilate that he is a king indeed, but shows him that his kingdom is of a very different kind from what is called kingdom in this world...

“Ye shall know the truth,” the Lord says, “and the truth shall make you free. I am the truth, and you shall be free as I am free. To be free, you must be sons like me. To be free, you must be that which you have to be, that which you are created to be... 

Christ died to save us, not from suffering, but from ourselves; not from injustice, far less from justice, but from being unjust. He died that we might live—but live as he lives, by dying as he died who died to himself that he might live unto God.