If In the Bay of Naples are several islands famous for their beauty. The sky of infinite depth and purity ; the sea pure as the sky, and rivalling its manifold tints of ever-changing glory ; the landscapes rich with the silver of the olive and the purple of the vine; the atmosphere full of the balm of flowers; and the horizon studded with picturesque spots, as a royal girdle with jewels, conspire to create a vision of delight. The Greek and Eoman in their quest of loveliness and pleasure built their palaces here, and to this focus of colour and joy the modern lovers of beauty hasten as butterflies to roses. Now one of these fairy islands is the property of the Italian Government, and its only inhabitants are convicts. How little to them all this matchless scenery ! Fettered, watched, driven, scourged, they can only be sickened by the splendour and irritated by the lavish treasures of earth and heaven. Is it not much like this with unregenerate man in regard to the blessings of life and the glory of the world ? 1
(3) The bondage of the conscience is part of the slavery of sin. Men are built in three storeys, so to speak. Down at the bottom, and to be kept there, are inclinations, passions, lust, desires, all which are but blind aimings after their appropriate satisfaction, without any question as to whether the satisfaction is right or wrong; and above that a dominant will which is meant to control, and above that a conscience. That is the pyramid ; and as the sunshine illumines the gilded top of some spire, so the shining apex, the conscience, is illumined when the light of God falls upon it. The commission of sin defiles the conscience, and conscience degrades us into convicts and cowards. The sense of
* "W. L. Watkinson, The Bcme and the Antidote, 235.
374 TRUTH AND FREEDOM
dignity, freedom, and confidence is lost in the act of transgression, and with the consciousness of guilt comes fear and bondage. And is not life to the unregenerate man a harsh and gloomy servitude ? We look upon God as " a hard Master." Is not that the natural conception of God? The heathen look upon Him in this light and represent Him by terrible images in their temples; and although we do not set up ghastly idols, our pessimistic concep- tions of the world's Creator and Euler are equally terrible. We think of Him, and are troubled. We look upon human duty as inequitable and exhausting, and fulfil our task with the discontent and bitterness of a slave. Finally, we look forward to the issues of life with deep misgiving. Through fear of death we are all our lifetime subject to bondage. At the bottom of all our pessimism, abjectness, and hopelessness is the consciousness of sin and guilt. Never did Shakespeare write a greater, deeper line than the one he puts into the mouth of Hamlet — " Thus conscience does make cowards of us all." The unintelligible wretchedness of human life and the vague terrors which haunt us are not in any wise mental in their origin and strength and to be abolished by fuller intellectual light ; they arise in the accusing conscience, and here primarily must our bondage and cowardice be dealt with.
^ The evils that we do, and that we cherish undone in our hearts, are like the wreckers on some stormy coast, who begin operations by taking the tongue out of the bell that hangs on the buoy, and putting out the light that beams from the beacon. Sin chokes conscience ; and so the worse a man is, the less he feels himself to be bad ; and while a saint will be tortured with agonies of remorse for some slight peccadillo, a brigand will add a murder or two to his list, and wipe his mouth and say, " I have done no harm." We are ignorant of our sins because we bribe our consciences, because we drug our consciences, and will not attend to the facts of our own spiritual being.^
2. The second thing that claims attention is that we may he unconscious of our bondage. This unconsciousness may be due to our never having consciously enjoyed freedom, or it may be due to the long time that has elapsed since we lost it, so that slavery has become a second nature.
(1) We may never have opened our hearts to the joy of being
* A. Maclaren.
ST. JOHN VIII. 32, 36 375
free. There is nothing about us that is more remarkable and more awful than the power that we have, by not attending to something, of making that something practically non-existent. The great searchlights that they now have on battleships will fling a beam of terrible revealing power on one small segment of the vast circle of the sea; and all the rest, though it may be filled with the enemy's fleet, will be lying in darkness. So just because we will not think of the facts of our slavery to sin, the facts are non-existent as far as we are concerned. Surely it is not a thing worthy of a man never to go down into the deep places of his own heart and see the ugly things that coil and wrestle and swarm and multiply there.