The one cure for any organism, is to be set right--to have all its
parts brought into harmony with each other; the one comfort is to know
this cure in process. Rightness alone is cure. The return of the
organism to its true self, is its only possible ease. To free a man from
suffering, he must be set right, put in health; and the health at the
root of man's being, his rightness, is to be free from wrongness, that
is, from sin. A man is right when there is no wrong in him. The wrong,
the evil is in him; he must be set free from it. I do not mean set free
from the sins he has done: that will follow; I mean the sins he is
doing, or is capable of doing; the sins in his being which spoil his
nature--the wrongness in him--the evil he consents to; the sin he is,
which makes him do the sin he does.

To save a man from his sins, is to say to him, in sense perfect and
eternal, 'Rise up and walk. Be at liberty in thy essential being. Be
free as the son of God is free.' To do this for us, Jesus was born, and
remains born to all the ages. When misery drives a man to call out to
the source of his life,--and I take the increasing outcry against
existence as a sign of the growth of the race toward a sense of the need
of regeneration--the answer, I think, will come in a quickening of his
conscience. This earnest of the promised deliverance may not, in all
probability will not be what the man desires; he will want only to be
rid of his suffering; but that he cannot have, save in being delivered
from its essential root, a thing infinitely worse than any suffering it
can produce. If he will not have that deliverance, he must keep his
suffering. Through chastisement he will take at last the only way that
leads into the liberty of that which is and must be. There can be no
deliverance but to come out of his evil dream into the glory of God.