During this state the raw, half-developed, ungraceful, unharmonized, and ever-erring boy of fifteen appears to have retrograded from the perfectly graceful and unconscious selfishness of the innocent child of four. But it is not so. The knowledge of sin is the stepping-stone to a higher righteousness than could have been obtained by perpetuating the innocence of childhood. Even during the period of the “bondage to the Law” there were occasional intervals of freedom, prophetic of a higher state. Duty, sometimes, shining out before the child as something purer and nobler than a mere inevitable debt, appeared “sweet and honourable;”[37] and wherever Duty thus revealed herself, the child, in freely and ungrudgingly obeying her, was obeying no unworthy emblem of the Father in heaven; and by such obedience his character was strengthened and matured. But now the time has come for another step upwards. The boy disobeys and is forgiven. At first, forgiveness makes no impression on him. He does not understand it, does not believe in it, because he does not quite believe in the author of it; he regards his father as one too far above him to be able to sympathize entirely with his boyish desires and impatience of restraint, too much like a Law to be capable of feeling real pain at his faults. As long as he is in this condition, forgiveness comes to him as the mere remission of penalty; he is glad to “get off,” but his heart is not yet touched, and there is therefore no real remission of sin, partly because he has no sufficient sense of sin, partly because he has no faith in the forgiver.
But at last comes the revelation of the meaning of forgiveness. Some outward sign, a mother’s tear, the mere expression of the father’s face—it may be this, or it may be something of much longer duration and far more complex—but something at last brings home to him the fact that his sin weighs like a crushing burden upon the heart of some one else, who, in spite of his sin, still loves him and still trusts in him. His parents, he finds—or it may be some brother, sister, or friend—are bearing his sin and carrying his iniquity as if it were their own: the shame and the pain of it, which he feels as a mere unpleasant uneasiness, are causing to others an acute sorrow of which he had not dreamed before. Instead of being savagely angry with him, furious at the mischief he has done, and at the disgrace which he has brought upon them, instead of visiting upon him all the consequences of his fault, his parents are themselves suffering some part of it, themselves crushed down by it: if they punish him, they are not punishing him vindictively but for his good—it is hard indeed to believe this, but he believes it at last—the chastisement of his peace falls upon them as well as upon him; their heart is broken and contrite for his sake; their souls are a sacrifice for his; they feel his sin as if it were their own; they have appropriated his sin; have been identified with his sin; they are “made sin” for him.