have only to think of your own experience to find out what that
means. Is there nothing in the set of your affections, in the
mastery that your passion has over you, in the habits of your lives,
which you know as well as God knows it, to be wrong and ruinous, and
of which you have tried to get rid? I know the answer, and every one
of us, if we will look into our own hearts, knows it: we are 'tied
and bound by the chains of our sin.' You do not need to go to
inebriate homes, where there are people that would cut their right
hands off if they could get rid of the craving, and cannot, to find
instances of this bondage. We have only to be honest with ourselves,
and to try to pull the boat against the stream instead of letting it
drift with it, to know the force with which the current runs. A tiny
thread like a spider's draws after it a bit of cotton a little
thicker, and knotted to that there is a piece of pack-thread, and
after that a two-stranded cord, and then a cable that might hold an
ironclad at anchor. That is a parable of how we draw to ourselves,
by imperceptible degrees, an ever-thickening set of manacles that
bind our wills and make us the servants of sin. 'His slaves ye are
whom ye obey.' Sin imprisons. That is, your sin--do not let us
befool ourselves with abstractions--_your_ sin imprisons you.

Sin blinds. Wherever there comes over a soul the mist of self-will
and self-regard, sight fails; and all the greatest things are
blurred and blotted. The man that is immersed in his own evil is
like one plunged in the ocean. The cold, salt waters are about him,
and above him; and to him the glories of the sky, and the brightness
of the sun, the tenderness of the colouring, are all blotted out. He
who goes through life as some of us do, never seeing God, never
seeing the loftiest beauty of goodness, never beholding with any
clearness of vision the radiant possibilities of the future and its