Nevertheless, sin thrusts itself upon our attention.  The greatest thinkers in all ages have been constrained to recognize its presence and power.  The creeds of all nations declare the fact that men everywhere feel the bitter working and intolerable burden of conscience.  And, however we may strive to forget our personal sinfulness, the cry is ever being wrung from us in the deepest moments of life, “O wretched man that I am! who can deliver me from the body of this death?” The sense of sin has persisted through changing generations; it is the burden of experience and philosophy, and the genius of the race has exhausted itself in devising schemes of salvation.

Aeschylus, Dante, Shakespeare, knew of truth, justice, purity, and love, of the supreme and eternal law of righteousness; they knew that man alone of all this lower creation is subject to this transcendental rule; they knew also that the violation of this highest law lay at the root of the world’s mysterious and complex suffering—­in other words, that sin was the secret of the tragedy of life.  The beasts are happy because they are beasts; they do not lie awake in the dark weeping over their sins, because they have no sins to weep over; they do not discuss their duty to God, they do it; whilst, on the contrary, men are unhappy because being subject to the highest law of all, and competent to fulfil that law in its utmost requirements, they have consciously fallen short of it, wilfully contradicted it.  We cannot accept the coat of many colors, whatever the flatterers may say; the sackcloth is ours, and it eats our spirit like fire.

Most fully does Christ recognize the great catastrophe.  Some modern theologians may dismiss sin as “a mysterious incident” in the development of humanity, as a grain of sand that has unluckily blown into the eye, as a thorn that has accidentally pierced our heel, but the greatest of ethical teachers regarded sin as a profound contradiction of that eternal will which is altogether wise and good.  More than any other teacher Jesus Christ emphasized the actuality and awfulness of sin; more than any other has He intensified the world’s consciousness of sin.  He never attempted to relieve us of the sackcloth by asserting our comparative innocence; He never attempted to work into that melancholy robe one thread of color, to relieve it with one solitary spangle of rhetoric.  Sin was the burden of the life of Christ because it is the burden of our life.  Christ has done more than insisted on the reality, the odiousness, the ominousness, of sin—­He has laid bare its principle and essence.  The New Testament discovers to us the mystery of iniquity as ungodliness; its inmost essence being unbelief in God’s truth, the denial of His justice, the rejection of His love, the violation of His law.  The South Sea islanders have a singular tradition to account for the existence of the dew.  The legend relates that in the beginning the earth touched the sky, that being the golden age when all