The text is " Behold, the Lamb of God, which taketh away [margin " beareth "] the sin of the world ! " Let us consider it in this way —
I. The Sin of the World. II. The Lamb of God.
III. The Lamb and the Sin.
The Sin of the World. <^f^^^ ^y'%
1/^^ — Sin, the choice of evil instead of good, the perversion f .^ of the oesires, the slavery of tlie will, the darkening of the juind. / y
* Richard Mant.
74 THE LAMB OF GOD
the deadly sickneaa of the whole heart — this is the fountain of all trouble, the cause of all disorder and wretchedness. This is the wall which makes the world seem sometimes" like a prison and sometimes like a madhouse. This is the curse which destroys life's harmony and beauty. This is the obstacle which separates the soul, in darkness and sorrow, from God. The forms of every religion, the voice of unceasing prayers, the smoke of endless burnt-offerings, the blood of bulls and goats, the oblations of all ^hat is most precious, cruel altars drenched with human gore, and flames consuming the offspring of man's body, — gifts, propitiations, pleadings, sacrifices, without stint and without number, — bear witness to the deep and awful sense of sin which rests upon the heart of the world.
What do we really think about sin — as we see it in others, as we find it in ourselves ? And side by side with such a question as that goes another : What is our conception of repentance ? We are all acquainted with its philological significance ; but what is its actual significance to our inmost conscience ? What is our attitude towards those sins which come to us again and again till we know their faces well enough, till they possess for us a degrading — or even, it may be, a fatal — familiarity ? What is our attitude towards that one type of sin which is, as it were, our constant companion — which we sometimes seriously try to shake off, but which appears to keep pace with us like the very shadow of ourselves ? What is our attitude towards that one particular piece of iniquity which, perhaps in the fierce heat of sudden temptation, or perhaps after cool and deliberate calculation, we committed in past years, and which stands out with such hideous prominence from the midst of a life that often has been far enough from being pure and innocent and unselfish and upright ?
As we have grown older, we have become clearer and clearer sighted, and we now see that what we at one time thought little or nothing of was really altogether unworthy of any Christian man or woman. Do not let us be afraid of this truer vision of the past; neither let us dread any sudden opening of the eyes, at some future moment, to what we are now, or to what we have been in the days that are beyond recall. Of course, we may let such a realization overwhelm us, but it is our own fault and folly if we do.
ST. JOHN I. 29 75
Man, what is this, and why art thou despairing ? God shall forgive thee all but thy despair.
We may awake and see the sins which we have committed throng- ing about us, just as Eobespierre — in the drama that was played some years ago in London — saw in the Conciergerie the ghosts of those whom he had sent to the guillotine. Those spectres may press upon us both on the right hand and on the left ; they may come from the days of youth, when we were weak and easily led ; or from early manhood or womanhood, when we were wild and reckless, without self-restraint and self-discipline ; or from later years, when our conscience had become hardened, and we had made ourselves capable of actions from which aforetime we should have shrunk. Yes ; they may come to threaten and appal us. But there is deliverance from them.
(1) The sense of sin is not found everywhere. The Egyptians and Babylonians had their catalogues of sins, but their sinfulness never troubled them as the sinfulness of the Hebrews troubled them. We may almost say that the ancient Greeks had no real conception of sin. The Greeks recognized the existence of vice, certain actions were to them unlovely, disagreeable, mischievous ; but the Greek people never felt the burden of their sinfulness. The countrymen of Homer and of Pericles were the lightest hearted of all the peoples of the earth, as joyous and as sunny as the sea which broke into laughter on the shores of their lovely islands. The Komans were far more earnest than the Greeks, but they had no deep consciousness of sin. We can hardly think of Julius Caesar shedding tears over his transgressions. Eome had her priests and her sacrifices, but her conception of sin had slight influence on either the personal or the national life. Christianity is pre-eminently the religion which develops in its adherents a sense of sin. Buddhism, and Brahminism, and Confucianism, and Zoroastrianism all lecognize the existence of evil, and attempt to deal with it in different ways ; but in none of these religions is there a recognition of sin in the sense in which Christians use that word.