"We were never in bondage to any man," said the Jews. We are but too
apt to repeat the empty boast, and as they forgot Pharaoh and
Nebuchadnezzar, Antiochus,and Cesar, we forget our failures, our
faults, our sins. We ignore them. Is not that, too, a plain fact of
experience? A sadly large percentage of men never have really opened
their eyes to the undeniable truth that sin has dominion over them.
They go along on the surface of things, keeping to the shallows of
human life, occupying themselves with their various duties and
enjoyments, and they never know, just because they shut their eyes to
facts, or rather turn their eyes away from facts-what is their real
condition in God's sight. Some of my present hearers are, in regard to
this matter, what the old Puritans used to call "Gospel-hardened." They
have their hearts and minds, I was going to say water-proofed, by
repeated application to them, as I am trying to apply them now, of
truths which but add one more film to the layers between their hearts
and the Gospel. Because they are so familiar with the words of our
message, they all but lose the faculty of bringing its power into
contact with themselves. Oh! if I could overcome that tendency which
there is in all regular church and chapel-goers to make themselves
comfortable in their corners, and suppose that the man in the pulpit is
saying what he ought to say, and that they need not give much heed to
his message because they have heard it all before-if I could once get
the sharp point of this great Christian truth of our slavery under sin,
through the manifold layers with which your heart is encrusted, you
would find out the weight of a good many things that some of you think
very phantasmal and of little consequence.
There is nothing about us that is more remarkable and more awful, when
you come to think of it, than the power that we have, by not attending
to something, of making that something practically non-existent. The
great search-lights, that they now have on battleships, will fling a
beam of terrible revealing power on one sma11 segment of the vast
circle of the sea; and all the rest, though it may be filled with the
enemy's fleet, will be lying in darkness. So just because we cannot get
you to think of the facts of your slavery to sin, the facts are
non-existent as far as you are concerned. Let me plead with you.
Surely! sure1y, it is not a thing worthy of a man never to go down into
the deep places of your own hearts and see the ugly things that coil
and wrestle and swarm and multiply there! Ezekiel was once led to a
place where, through a hole broken in the wall, there was showed him an
inner chamber, on the walls of which were painted the hideous idols of
the heathen. And there, in the presence of the foul shapes, stood
venerable priests and official dignitaries of Israel, with their
censers in their hands, and their backs to the oracle of God. There is
a chamber like that in all our hearts; and it would be a great deal
better that we should go down, through the hole in the wall, and see
it, than that we should live, as so many of us do, in this fool's
paradise of ignorance of our own sin. It is because we will not attend
to the facts that we ignore the facts. The evils that we do, and that
we cherish undone in our hearts, are like the wreckers on some stormy
coast, that begin operations by taking the tongue out of the bell that
hangs on the buoy, and putting out the light that beams from the
beacon. Sin chokes conscience; and so the worse a man is, the less he
feels himself to be bad; and while a saint will be tortured with
agonies of remorse for some slight peccadillo, a brigand will add a
murder or two to his list, and wipe his mouth and say, "I have done no
harm." We are ignorant of our sin because we bribe our consciences,
because we drug our consciences, because we will not attend to the
facts of our own spiritual being.
That ignorance of our bondage is characteristic of the tone of mind of
this generation. Things have changed in that respect, as in a great
many others, since I was a boy. I do not hear now, from people who
desire to unite themselves to Jesus Christ, the deep poignant penitence
and confession of sin that one used to hear. I do not hear the facts of
sin, its gravity and universality, preached from pulpits in the way it
used to be. I notice in the ordinary, average man a tendency to think
more about environment and heredity, than about individidual
responsibility, and on the whole a very much lowered sense of the depth
and the power and the universality of transgression. And that is why,
to a large extent, the Christianity of this generation is so shallow a
thing as it is.