3. The true enlargement comes only when the law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus sets us free from the law of sin and death. Then are we brought out from the confining bars of the prison-house of the soul ; then have we the vision and the faculty Divine, and become far-sighted indeed. We feel like one who has been transferred from the dark, dreary depths of a cavern to the summit of a lofty mountain, from which the eye takes in at a glance a boundless horizon. We have a sense of recovered freedom which quickens and enlarges the soul. Old familiar things acquire a new aspect and meaning. The vastness and glory of the universe fill us with joy, because it all belongs to our Father, and is ours by virtue of our Divine sonship. We behold the things that are unseen and eternal. Both worlds, the earthly and the heavenly, come within our horizon, and are
visible in one view to the eye of faith. All things are ours
life and death, things present and things to come.
1[ We speak of a prisoner being " set at large " ; but we little realise what the phrase means to him — the new and thrillino- sense of largeness around him ; air and space and light, and God's great world, with its lofty sky overhead ; nothing confining" his rnove- ments or intercepting his view but the horizon, which, in the far distance, comes down upon the earth with walls of blue air, opening up into farther distances as he moves on. His eye' hitherto accustomed to the semi-opaque gloom of the narrow prison-cell, beholds with rapture the wide, open country. In such new circumstances his soul expands within him, and he feels himself a part of the infinite light and liberty around.^
4. There is no promise more pronounced in the Scriptures than just this promise of the enlargement and intensification of the sight. We are to be delivered from petty outlooks, from narrow
^ Hugh Macmillan,
202 THE GREAT TEXTS OF THE BIBLE
and confined horizons, and we are to see things in large relation- ships, and to behold the far-off issues. It is the will of our God that we should be spiritually endowed with a sort of prairie sight, with eyes that can scan mighty areas and see things when they are far away. Long sight is what the majority of us lack, and it is what we all need. It is essential to the healthiness of our spirits that we should be able to see things before they are quite at our doors.
(1) I want to be able to see temptation when it is a long way off. I need to distinguish sin in its small and apparently innocent beginnings. I want the perception which can detect it when it is in the germ, when it is a mere infant, when it is a playful cub. Yes, I need to be able to read the fatality that dwells in the cub long before it becomes a full-grown and overpowering beast. I am so easily deceived, and I hear the world say to me, " There is no harm in it," and the specious utterance frequently leads to my undoing. I want long sight.
IF Some of you know the old Greek story describing how Ulysses slew the monster Proteus. You know how he had been fore- warned that it would be of no use to kill it only in its first form, because the monster would change itself from shape to shape, appearing now as a seal, now as a lion, now as a bear. Only by recognising it in its first form, and killing it in each different shape, could he hope to conquer it in the end. And you remember how, by following this advice, Ulysses was able to conquer, though only after a very long struggle.
It is only an old Greek legend, I know ; but perhaps it will bring out more clearly what we mean by sins "in disguise." Sometimes a temptation to sin comes to you — so small that it seems hardly worth your while to fight against it. But if you do not recognise it as a sin in its first form, and try to overcome it at once, then it, too, will change from shape to shape, until at last it will become a giant sin, bearing, perhaps, no likeness at all to the first little sin which as boys you allowed to enter your mind, but a giant sin so huge that you cannot cast it out.^
H It was only the other day that we read in the papers of con- ceit leading a man on to commit a brutal murder. When the actor William Terriss was killed, we thought at first that there must have been some strong motive for the crime : some cruel injustice, some secret wrong, had been done to the man ; it would all come out at the inquest. But no, at the inquest no particular reason
* F. de W. Lushington, Servians to the Young Boys, p. 19,
ISAIAH 203
could be assigned. It was only that the man, Prince, from his boyhood up had thought of himself too highly — always looking for admiration, and angry when he didn't get it ; failing again and again, but always thinking his failure undeserved. At last this wrong idea of his power produced in him a distorted view of his abilities, a condition of mind which the doctors described as a form of madness, and led him to kill in cold blood a man who, he thought, had slighted him, but who had really done him no single wrong.^