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can resist the current! Eeveal to him the secret of his own personality — its secret and its awfulness ! Tell him to practise inflexibility, to practise resistance to the waters ! Bid him culti- vate determination, resolution, unwaveringness of purpose ! Teach him to train his will as he would train his eye ! Exhort him to withstand by daily exercise the pressure of that ancestral stream of passion which has widened into a river and is deepening into a sea ! That is the message to Ezekiel. I could imagine no more trenchant message for our own day. We are very much in the position of Ezekiel's countrymen. We have invested heredity with an absolute power. We are in danger of forgetting our responsibility. We want an Ezekiel — some preacher to tell us, not of the race, but of the individual. We want something to strengthen, not the nation, but the unit. Anything that gives force to the individual man will be our Ezekiel, and ought to be welcomed as such.1
The Eesponsibility of the Individual.
"The soul that sinneth."
1. The feeling is deep-seated in our nature that sin is excusable; that it comes from causes which we cannot help ; that it has borne us down and carried us away, rather than been of our own seeking. Our circumstances are made to excuse it. The strength of temptation, the weakness of will, our surroundings, the events of our time, the inevitable sequence of our life. There may be much in such facts, and Scripture does not ignore their influence on the side of truth in the necessarian view of life. Scripture not only does not say there is no truth in it; it often emphasizes it. Yet it never forgets the deeper truth, and so never lowers it. It never allows any pressure of circumstances really to excuse us. It appeals from all external conditions to the inner sanctuary of the self, and says to the sinner in the very pride of his sin, when perhaps he has put conscience to sleep, and enthroned sensual appetite above Divine desire, You are the man. You have sinned, and you know it. You have preferred the evil to the good. You have chosen darkness rather than light, your deeds being evil. Do not try to excuse yourself by circumstances ; you know that your 1 G. Matheson, The Representative Men of the Bible, ii. 321.
EZEKIEL xviii. 4, 27 18
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sins lay deeper than any circumstances — in your own will, your own choice of the evil when you had power to choose otherwise. " Be not deceived ; God is not mocked." Your own higher nature is not befooled. " For whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap. For he that soweth to his flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption ; but he that soweth to the Spirit shall of the Spirit reap life everlasting."
Tj The Bible is full of the doctrine of heredity. Whatever view we may take of the Fall, it holds as a declaration of the un- broken sequence in cause and effect between the latest generations and the earliest. The Old Testament doctrine, that the sins of the fathers are visited upon the children to the third and fourth generation, is to the same effect. But the Bible, while admitting and affirming the solidarity of the race and the large extent to which man's destiny is shaped for him before his birth, is at direct issue with the materialistic fatalism which would rid the individual of moral responsibility.
What religion, in fact, contends for is that the human ego within a certain limited area — an area conditioned by the facts of heredity and the existing environment — is a fount of creative power. Surrounded by competing and often opposing currents of influence, which beat upon it from both the material and the spiritual world, it has the faculty of choosing which of these it shall yield itself to. The immense changes that come over men as the result of the differing influences under which from time to time they place themselves, show that our characters are not ready-made and irreversible, but are every day in the making. The view of life, in fact, which accords most closely with Scripture, with the facts of experience, and with our deepest moral intuitions, is that which regards it as an inheritance which we are to deal with as we will. We have not made the inheritance. It comes down to us from the far past, carrying with it all manner of burdens, limitations, mortgages and what not, the result of the good or bad stewardship of those who held it before us. For these limitations we are not answerable. What we are responsible for is, when once in possession, to do the best with what there is. That the estate may have been impoverished by a spendthrift ancestor does not absolve us from the obligation of personal thrift. The more does that lie upon us, in order to improve what is left and hand it on in improved conditions to the next heir. And the man who seeks to do this will find in Christ's Gospel a store of vital energy which will make him master of his fate.1
1 J. Brierley.
1 84 THE DEATH OF THE SOUL