The weakness and unbelief of men has led them to think of God as bound to punish for the sake of punishing, as an offset to their sin; they could not believe in clear forgiveness; that did not seem divine; it needed itself to be justified; so they invented for its justification a horrible injustice...

Truth is indeed too good for men to believe; unable to believe in the forgivingness of their father in heaven, they invented a way to be forgiven that should not demand of him so much...

I would save my fellows from having what notion of God is possible to them blotted out by a lie...

If there be no satisfaction to justice in the mere punishment of the wrong-doer, what shall we say of the notion of satisfying justice by causing one to suffer who is not the wrong-doer?

The salvation of Christ is salvation from the smallest tendency or leaning to sin. It is a deliverance into the pure air of God’s ways of thinking and feeling... 

Many there are who do not care for a love that will insist upon the uttermost farthing...

A man might flatter, or bribe, or coax a tyrant; but there is no refuge from the love of God...

The more we believe in God, the surer we shall be that he will spare nothing that suffering can do to deliver his child from death... 

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?