Still you must take sides for or against Christ, and you cannot be neutral. For His claims reach you not as external facts to be passively gazed at, but as imperative, active demands that lay hold of you, and insist that you shall take action upon them. You must yield or you must resist. You must comply or you must oppose. Christ lays His hand on you and if you will not obey you must shake that hand rudely off. In countless forms that strange, drawing power lays hold of you, and you must follow or reject. It may be a call to you to yield your reverence, your support, your participation to some benevolent or religious movement. If you will not, while others do accede to this claim, you must seek to justify your refusal. So you are forced into disparaging it, depreciating it, slandering it. You cannot own it to be of God and yet remain a rebel against its demands. So you must, with evil, malignant tongue, sneer at it as folly, or revile it as delusion—thus imitating the Pharisees who set down Christ's work to be the doing of the devil. Remember, too, what a black-hearted, hateful sin that was they were guilty of. Try and picture that gentle, beneficent, holy Jesus. Realise the cruel blow such a thought was to the man just healed. Surely caution, reserve, would have made men hesitate to speak so. But they cruelly, malignantly, eagerly cry, "By Beelzebub He casteth out devils." It was in the face of such light, such considerate helpful words of Christ, that they did it. Think of the gracious words He spoke, and of the beauty of all that life, which in our days bring from the hearts of unbelievers encomiums that sound like adoration. In spite of all that, they were not made reverent, careful, slow to condemn. Nay, they were exasperated by it all.