the sinful conditions and habits and dispositions of his earlier life,
has not carried out of them an absolute shame for them, that shall let
him say to his boy, by word and by every utterance of his life within
the house where he and the boy live together, "Refrain, for they are
abominable things!" To get rid of the glamour of sin, to get rid of the
idea that it is a glorious thing to be dissipated instead of being
concentrated to duty, to get rid of the idea that to be drunken and to
be lustful are true and noble expressions of our abounding human life,
to get rid of any idea that sin is aught but imprisonment, is to make
those who come after us, and to make ourselves in what of life is left
for us, gloriously ambitious for the freedom of purity, for a full
entrance into that life over which sin has no dominion. And yet, at the
same time, don't you see that while sin thus becomes contemptible when
we think about the great illustration of the will of God and Jesus
Christ, don't you see how also it puts on a new horror? That which I
thought I was doing in the halls of my imprisonment I have really been
doing within the possible world of God in which I might have been free.
The moment I see what life might have been to me, then any sin becomes
dreadful to me. Have you ever thought of how the world has stood in
glory and honor before the sinless humanity of Jesus Christ? If any life
could prove, if any argument could show on investigation to-day that
Jesus did one sin in all his life, that the perfect liberty which was
his perfect purity was not absolutely perfect, do you realize what a
horror would seem to fall down from the heavens, what a constraint and
burden would be laid upon the lives of men, how the gates of men's
possibilities would seem to close in upon them? It is because there has
been that one life which, because absolutely pure from sin, was
absolutely free; it is because man may look up and see in that life the
revelation and possibility of his own; it is because that life, echoing
the great cry throughout the world that man everywhere is the son of