' Henry Ward Beecher.
ST. MARK * 129
ment, indiscriminated, unchecked. And the dishonoured will now seeks to justify its degradation by an appeal to the in- tellect. Sin is decried as an ecclesiastical bogey. It is easy to get rid of grace by saying that it has been dangerously patronised by an enslaving priestcraft. Enjoyment must be scientifically sought, and that means sometimes at our neighbour's expense by acts of unkindness, malignity, or incredible meanness. And then from the intellect it goes to the heart. " My people love to have it so." This is looked upon as a sufficient account of life. Nothing more is desired, nothing more is looked for. " I will pull down my barns, and build greater." This is the extent of the heart's ambition. See how the great mistake has spread ! Self has deflected all the relations of life until the man has become denaturalised. What can the Holy Spirit do for him ? The claims of religion are a tiresome impertinence ; the duties to society are a wearisome toil. The thought of death is a terror, and the other world a blank. He has made a great mistake — his relations to the world, to God, to self, are inverted unless God interferes, i.e. unless the man allows God to interfere ; , he is guilty of an eternal sin, in the sense of having made an I irreparable mistake, and missed the object for which he was ! created, the purpose for which he was endowed.
(2) As a Great Catastrophe. — Whereas the lower animals are almost mechanically kept in bounds by instinct, man owes this to the sovereignty of his will, that in every action he does, he must command and be obeyed as a free man, or submit and be controlled like a conscious slave. And from the early days of his history there has been a tendency to dissolution and catastrophe in the injury known as sin. Sin means a defeat ; it means that the man has been beaten somewhere, that the enemy has swept over the barrier, and laid siege to the soul ; it means a revolution, that the lower powers have risen up and shaken off control ; and this in the end means injury ; if persisted in, an eternal prostration of the soul. It is an awful moment for a man when he feels he cannot stop, when the will utters a feeble voice, and the passions only mock ; when habit I winds its coils tighter and tighter round him like a python, and ' he feels his life contracting in its cruel folds. What a terrible consciousness to wake up to the thought that the position which
ST. MARK — 9
I30 THE GREAT TEXTS OF THE BIBLE
God has given us, the talents, the intellect, the skill have been abused by a real perversion of life, and that we have been doing only harm when we were meant to be centres of good ! See how an eternal sin may mean an eternal catastrophe, where the forces of life have become mutinous and disobedient ; where self-control has gone for ever, and anarchy or misrule riot across life — where there is the perversion of blessings, which reaches its climax in the fact that man is the great exception in the order of Nature ; that while every other living thing is striving for its own good, man alone is found choosing what he knows to be for his hurt. There is no ruin to compare to it, no depravity so utterly depraved as that which comes from a disordered and shattered human nature. There it floats down the tide of life, a derelict menacing the commerce of the world, an active source of evil as it drifts along, burning itself slowly away down to the water's edge, once a gallant ship, now a wreck ; once steered in the path of active life, now drifting in the ways of death — an eternal sin. (3) As a Great Loss. — " I do not wonder at what people suffer ; but I wonder often at what they lose." You see a blind man gazing with vacant stare at the glorious beauty of a sunrise or sunset, when the changing light displays ever a fresh vesture for the majesty of God. It is all blank to him, and you say, " Poor man, ah, what he has lost ! " You see one impassive and unmoved at the sound of splendid music, where the notes ebb and flow in waves of melody about his ears ; one who can hear no voice of birds, no voice of man, in the mystery of deafness ; and you say again, " Poor man, what he has lost ! " But there is a loss of which these are but faint shadows. The jloss of God out of life, which begins, it may be, with a deprivation, and is a disquieting pang ; which, if it is not arrested, becomes death ; which, if persisted in, becomes eternal, becomes utter and complete separation from God ; which becomes what we know as hell — the condition of an eternal sin. A mortal sin as it passes over the soul is a fearful phenomenon. And yet it has been pointed out that the little sins play a more terrible part than we know in the soul's tragedy. A great sin often brings its own visible punishment, its own results ; we see its loathsomeness ; but the little sins are so little we hardly notice them. " They are like the drizzling rain which wets us through