the tinge of his personality. So sin in a man takes on the color and tone
of his individuality.

One man has the inner disposition against God, accompanied by no excesses
at all. These things disgust him. He is refined in his tastes, perhaps
scholarly and intellectual in his thinking. That inner disposition may be
a sort of refined ignoring of God either defiant or indifferent. In
another, the animal nature swings to the front, stronger perhaps by
heredity, and, yielded to, it runs to the excess of riot. Then there is
the man with the strange yellow fever, whose love for the bright-colored
precious metal burns in his blood and controls every impulse and purpose.
And the man with intense love of power, of controlling men and things for
the sake of the immense power involved, with himself as the centre of all.

There is every imaginable degree of each of these, and every sort of
combination among them. The lines cross and re-cross at every possible
angle in various persons. A man is apt to get money-drunk then
society-drunk (with a special definition for the word society in this
connection), then lust-drunk. Or, he may swing direct from
money-intoxication into power-intoxication. Please notice keenly that each
of these four grows up out of a perfectly normal, natural desire. Sin
always follows nature's grooves. There is nothing wrong in itself. The sin
is in the wrong motive underneath, or the wrong relationship round about
an act. Or, it is in excess, exaggeration, pushing an act out of its true
proportion. Exaggeration floods the stream out of its channel. Wrong
motive or wrong relationship sends a bad stream into a good channel.

But sift down under the surface and always is found the same thing. The
upper growth is varied by what it finds on the surface to mingle with, but
the sub-stuff is ever the same. The root always is self. The whole seed of