enough to sting--there does lie, in each of us, the consciousness that
we are wrong with God, and need something to put us right?

And, brethren, let modern philanthropists of all sorts take this
lesson: The thing that the world wants is to have sin dealt
with--dealt with in the way of conscious forgiveness; dealt with in
the way of drying up its source, and delivering men from the power of
it. Unless you do that, I do not say you do nothing, but you pour a
bottle full of cold water into Vesuvius, and try to put the fire out
with that. You may educate, you may cultivate, you may refine; you may
set political and economical arrangements right in accordance with the
newest notions of the century, and what then? Why! the old thing will
just begin over again, and the old miseries will appear again, because
the old grandmother of them all is there, the sin that has led to
them.

Now do not misunderstand me, as if I were warring against good and
noble men who are trying to remedy the world's evils by less thorough
methods than Christ's Gospel. They will do a great deal. But you may
have high education, beautiful refinement of culture and manners; you
may divide out political power in accordance with the most democratic
notions; you may give everybody 'a living wage,' however extravagant
his notions of a living wage may be. You may carry out all these
panaceas and the world will groan still, because you have not dealt
with the tap-root of all the mischief. You cannot cure an internal
cancer with a plaster upon the little finger, and you will never
stanch the world's wounds until you go to the Physician that has balm
and bandage, even Jesus Christ, that takes away the sins of the world.
I profoundly distrust all these remedies for the world's misery as in
themselves inadequate, even whilst I would help them all, and regard