I. We consider, first, the recognition by revelation of sin.  Sackcloth is the outward and visible sign of sin, guilt, and misery.  How men shut their eyes to this most terrible reality—­coolly ignoring, skilfully veiling, emphatically denying it!  “The heart from the moment of its first beat instinctively longs for the beautiful....”  We strive for the right and the true:  it is circumstance that thrusts wrong upon us.  What is popularly called sin these philosophers call error, accident, inexperience, indecision, misdirection, imperfection, disharmony; but they will not allow the presence in the human heart of a malign force which asserts itself against God, and against the order of His universe.  That principle which is darkness in the mind, perverseness in the will, idolatry in the affections, “every passion’s wild excess, anger, lust, and pride,”—­the existence of any such principle they absolutely and scornfully deny.  There is no evil in the universe, all is good, and where everything is good human nature is still the best.  A single substance comprises all that is, and no place is left for that profoundly decisive and destructive element called sin; all that we have to do is to descant on the marvelous loveliness of the world, the serene harmony of the universe, man’s love of the true, the beautiful, and the good.  Intellectual masters like Emerson and Renan. ignore conscience; they refuse to acknowledge the selfishness, the baseness, the cruelty of society; they are deaf to the groans of creation; they smile, and expect us to smile, whilst they clap a purple patch of rhetoric on the running sores of humanity.  No sackcloth must pass their gate, and no craftsman of Ind ever wove gossamer half so delicate and delightful as the verbal veil with which these literary artists attempt to conceal the leprosy of our nature.

And men generally are willing to dupe themselves touching the fact and power of sin; they are strongly disinclined to look directly and honestly at that inner confusion of which we are all more or less conscious.  We willingly acknowledge our transgression of the higher law, that we do the things we ought not to do, and leave undone the things that we ought to do; we have an unpleasant feeling that all is not right, nay, indeed, that something is seriously wrong; but we do not unshrinkingly acquaint ourselves with the malady of the spirit as we should at once acquaint ourselves with any malady hinting itself in the flesh.  The sackcloth must not mar our shallow happiness.  Great is the power of self-deception, but in no other direction do we permit ourselves to be more profoundly cheated than we do in this.  In the vision of beautiful things we forget the troubles of conscience, as the first sinners hid themselves amid the leaves and flowers of Paradise; in fashion and splendor we forget our guilty sorrow, as medieval mourners sometimes concealed their cerements with raiment of purple and gold; in the noises of the world we become oblivious of the interior discords, as soldiers forget their wounds amid the stir and trumpets of the battle.  With a busy life, a gay life, we manage to forget the skeleton of the heart, rarely permitting ourselves to look upon the ominous specter which some way or other has entrenched itself within us, and which is the bane of our existence.