shall come as Judge invested with full power in His majesty and justice to examine into our sins against His commands and laws. For thus we shall be more clearly convicted, put to shame, driv en into a corner, and be utterly unable to say a word in reply or excuse.
Because the sinner to his great shame shall be irrefutably convinced that he could and should have led a better life. Why so? Because if our heavenly Father were to examine us only in the divine nature, He would condemn us merely for insulting His sovereign majesty; but Jesus Christ in addition to that will put us to greater shame and convict us more clearly by the life He led amongst us and the example He gave to all men to encourage them to the practice of virtue. If we heard the sentence of condemnation from God alone, on account of having transgressed His commands, we should be indeed convinced that we should have kept the commandments; but since that same sentence shall come from the lips of the incarnate God, it will convince us that we could easily have kept the commandments. Thus there will be nothing for us to plead in excuse, and the grievous injustice of sin will be made much more evident to us. If the Judge were to say to us as He did in olden times to the Hebrews: “I am the Lord thy God,” who created thee out of the dust of the earth; how couldst thou, miserable worm, dare to disobey My commands and to live according to thy own will? we might answer perhaps, byway of excuse, O great Lord and God! it is true I should have been most obedient to Thee; I cannot deny that I am guilty and deserve punishment; but remember, since Thou knowest all things, how frail is the handful of clay out of which Thou hast made me! “The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak;”[1] the soul Thou hast infused to me was indeed ready to avoid sin and to do good, but my miserable flesh is too frail and has done violence, as it were, to the spirit in order to have its own way. Thus no matter how terrible the judgment may otherwise be, if we were to be tried only by the infinite majesty of God, we might have some way of escaping the penalty due to our disobedience in transgressing a law so hard for our weak nature. But before the tribunal of Jesus Christ, a Man like to ourselves and subject to the law as we are—“God sent His Son made of a woman, made under the law,”[2] as St. Paul says—before such a Judge what excuse could we put forward? O fear without hope! Anguish with-
