the baser part of him cling to the old prison, to the ease and the
provision for him, to the absence of anxiety and of energy? I think
there can hardly be a prisoner who, with any leap of heart, goes out of
the prison door, when his term is finished, and does not even look into
that black horror where he has been living, cast some lingering, longing
look behind. He comes to the exigencies, to the demands of life, to the
necessity of making himself once more a true man among his fellow-men.
But does he stop? He comes forth, and if there be the soul of a man in
him still, he enters into the new life with enthusiasm, and finds the
new powers springing in him to their work. And if it be so with every
special duty, then with that great thing which you and I are called upon
to do--the total acceptance by our nature of the will of God, the total
acceptance by our nature of the mastery of Jesus Christ. Oh! how this
world has perverted words and meanings, that the mastery of Jesus Christ
should seem to be the imprisonment and not the enfranchisement of the
soul! When I bring a flower out of the darkness and set it in the sun,
and let the sunlight come streaming down upon it, and the flower knows
the sunlight for which it was made and opens its fragrance and beauty;
when I take a dark pebble and put it into the stream and let the silver
water go coursing down over it and bringing forth the hidden color that
was in the bit of stone, opening the nature that is in them, the flower
and stone rejoice. I can almost hear them sing in the field and in the
stream. What then? Shall not man bring his nature out into the fullest
illumination, and surprise himself by the things that he might do? Oh!
the littleness of the lives that we are living! Oh! the way in which we
fail to comprehend, or when we do comprehend, deny to ourselves the
bigness of that thing which it is to be a man, to be a child of God!
Sometimes it dawns upon us that we can see it opening into the vision of
these men and women in the New Testament. Sometimes there opens to us
the picture of this thing that we might be, and then there are truly the