“All I could never be, All, men ignored in me, This, I was worth to God, whose wheel the pitcher shaped.” “Dig deep enough into any man,” St. Augustine said, “and you will find something divine.” We supposed he believed in total depravity, and he does in theory believe in it; but when it is a matter of actual experience, he announces this deep fact which fits perfectly with his other great utterance: “Thou, O God, hast made us for thyself, and we are restless (dissatisfied) until we find ourselves in thee.” Too long we have assumed that Adam, the failure, is the type of our lives, that he is the normal man, that to err is human, and that one touch, that is, blight, of nature makes all men kin. What Christ has revealed to us is the fact that we always have higher and diviner possibilities in us. He, the overcomer, and not Adam, is the true type, the normal person, giving us at last the pattern of life which is life indeed. Which is the real self, then? Surely this higher possible self, this one which we discover in our best moments. The Greeks always held that sin was “missing the mark”—that is what the Greek word for sin means—failure to arrive at, to reach, the real end toward which life aims. Sin is defeat. It is loss of the trail. It is undoing. The sinner has not found himself, he has not come to himself. He has missed the real me. He cannot say, “I am.” If that is a fact, and if the life of spiritual health and attainment is the normal life, we surely ought to do more than is done to help young people to realize it and to assist them to find themselves. We are much more concerned to manufacture things than we are to make persons. We do one very well and we do the other very badly. Kipling’s “The Ship that Found Itself” is a fine account of the care bestowed upon every rivet and screw, every valve and piston. He pictures the ship in the stress and strain of a great storm and each part of the ship from keel to funnel describes what it has to bear and to do in the emergency and how it has been prepared in advance for just this crisis. Nansen was asked how he felt when he found that the _Fram_ was caught in the awful jam of the Arctic ice-floe. “I felt perfectly calm,” he said. “I knew she could stand it. I had watched every stick of timber and every piece of steel that went into her hull. The result was that I could go to sleep and let the ice do its worst.” With even more care we build the airplane. There must be no chance for capricious action. The propeller blades must be made of perfect wood. There must be no defect in any piece of the structure. The gasoline must be tested by all the methods of refinement. The oil must be absolutely pure, free of every suspicion of grit.