which men immediately and presently are. There is not any moment of the
human soul which has not rested upon some great conception that man was
a nobler being than he was ordinarily conceiving himself to be; that he
was not destined to the things which were ordinarily occupying his life;
that he might be living a greater and nobler life. It is because the
Christian Scriptures have laid most earnestly hold of this idea, it is
because it was represented not simply in the words which Christ said,
but in the very being which Christ was, that we go to them to get the
inspiration and the indication, the revelation and the enlightenment
which we need. I have read to you these few words in which Christ
declares the whole subject, the whole character of which His life is and
what His work is about to do, because it seems to me that they strike at
once the key-note of that which we want to understand. They let us enter
into the full conception of that which the new life which is offered to
man really is. There are two conceptions which come to every man when he
is entering upon a new life, changing his present life to something that
is different from the present life, and being a different sort of
creature and living in a different sort of a way. The first way in which
it presents itself to him--almost always at the beginning of every
religion, perhaps--is in the way of restraint and imprisonment. Man
thinks of every change that is to come to him as in the nature of denial
of something that he is at the present doing and being, as the laying
hold upon himself of some sort of restraint, bringing to him something
which says: "I must not do the thing which I am doing. I must lay upon
myself restraints, restrictions, commandments, and prohibitions. I must
not let myself be the man that I am." You see how the Old Testament
comes before the New Testament, the law ringing from the mountain top
with the great denials, the great prohibitions, that come from the mouth
of God. "Thou shalt not do this, that, or the other--Thou shalt not
murder. Thou shalt not steal. Thou shalt not commit adultery. Thou shalt