Page:Tracts for the Times Vol 2.djvu/281

Rh fast to repentance to the very end of life, nor anticipate that any pardon should be given you from man's judgment; he who would promise you this would deceive you. For what thou hast sinned against the, thou must expect the remedy from Him alone, in the day of judgment."

The Fathers despaired of none. "We must despair of the conversion of none," says St. Augustine, "either within or without the Church, as long as the patience of leadeth them to repentance, and He 'visits their offences with a rod, and their sins with scourges.' For thus He does not utterly take away His mercy from them, if they would but at length have compassion on their own souls, pleasing ." But they constantly repeated the Prophet's warning, "Woe to them that are at ease in Zion;" "tremble, ye that are at ease, be troubled, ye careless ones; strip you, and make you bare, and gird sackcloth upon your loins;" and would, we might once again hear their voice of warning sound through our land, that our sleepers might awake, and arise from the dead, and give them light, before they be awakened by the trump of the Archangel!

Moderns, by giving to this change after Baptism, when it is needed, or occurs, the name of regeneration, or the new birth, so far coincide with the doctrine of the Fathers, and have expressed their conviction also, that this birth takes place once only. Nor were there any objection in itself to the term; nor could any language be too strong to express the vehemence of that change, from the sleep of death to the life of holiness; from the phrenzy and drunkenness of sin to a right mind and "reasonable service," from being "fast bound in misery and iron," to the "glorious liberty of the sons of ;" from darkness to light; from Hell to Heaven; from Satan to. No term were too strong for this, if it confused not our apprehensions of other truths of the Gospel; or, because vouchsafed again to create His lost image in their souls, again to re-mould, re-form, re-fuse them, and bring them, re-created, through the iron fumade of repentance and bitter suffering, into a fresh life, and again "form  within them," they did not deny His former mercies, and