Page:First Annual Report of the Woodbury Hill Reformatory.djvu/20

 and the advancement of the divine principle within us—is each ones probation. The interest that attaches to a Reformatory boy, is, that in him these forces have not to be regarded indirectly, and only through the actions which often successfully cloke them, but overtly, obviously, and positively. It is not that—what we have to deal with is necessarily more sinful, than what in the world around us escapes such treatment, but that, what we have to treat is actually confessed sinfulness, and that all those powers and agencies from the punishment whereby God has marked His sense of it—to the mercy which will not condemn because of it—are ours not merely to proclaim as a prescription, but to apply as a remedy.

Between those defective extremes just referred to, which, as elsewhere, meet in a too free condonance, comes that better teaching which our Church bestows, wherein the discipline of the law tempers, for those who have thrust themselves back under law, the fuller privilege of the Gospel. Whilst the one permits us to say "Neither do I condemn thee!" the other may confirm such acquittal by teaching them to "Go, and sin no more."

D. MELVILLE.