Then the awakening begins. Then can preaching stir the heart until
deep answereth unto deep. It can talk of the struggle with moral
temptation and weakness; of the unstable temperament which oscillates
between the gutter and the stars; of the perversion or abuse of
impulses good in themselves; of the dreadful dualism of the soul. For
these are inheritances which have made life tragic in every generation
for innumerable human beings. Whoever needed to explain to a company
of grown men and women what the cry of the soul for its release from
passion is? Every generation has its secret pessimists, brooding over
the anarchy of the spirit, the issues of a distracted life. We need
not ask with Faust, "Where is that place which men call 'Hell'?" nor
wait for Mephistopheles to answer,
"Hell is in no set place, nor is it circumscribed,
For where we are--is Hell!"
Now, it is from such central and poignant experiences as these that
men have been constrained to look outward for a God. For these mark
the very disintegration of personality, the utter dissipation of
selfhood. That is the inescapable horror of sin. That is what we mean
when we say sinners are lost; so they are, they are lost to their own
selves. With what discriminating truth the father in the parable of
the lost boy speaks. "This, my son," he says, "was dead though he is
alive again." So it is with us; being is the price we pay for sinning.
The more we do wrong the less we are. How then shall we become alive
again?
It is out of the shame and passion, the utter need of the human heart,
which such considerations show to be real that men have built up their
redemptive faiths. For all moral victory is conditioned upon help from
without. To be sure each will and soul must strive desperately, even
unto death, yet all that strife shall be in vain unless One stoops
down from above and wrestles with us in the conflict. For the sinner
must have two things, both of them beyond his unaided getting, or he
will die. He must be released from his captivity. Who does not know
the terrible restlessness, that grows and feeds upon itself and then
does grow some more, of the man bound by evil and wanting to get out?
The torture of sin is that it deprives us of the power to express
ourselves. The cry of moral misery, therefore, is always the groaning
of the prisoner. Oh, for help to break the bars of my intolerable
and delicious sin that I may be myself once more! Oh, for some power
greater than I which, being greater, can set me free!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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