in the fact of sin.  The assertion is abundantly confirmed.  Does not conscience assent?  We all admit ‘faults,’ do we not?  We all acknowledge ‘imperfections.’  It is that little word ‘sin’ which seems to bring in another order of considerations, and to command the assent of conscience less readily.  But sin is nothing except fault considered in reference to God’s law.  Bring the notion of God into the life, and ‘faults’ and ‘slips’ and ‘weaknesses,’ and all the other names by which we try to smooth down the ugliness of the ugly thing, start up at once into their tone, magnitude, and importance, and stand avowed as sins.

Well now, if there be, therefore, this universal consciousness of imperfection, and if that consciousness of imperfection has only need to be brought into contact with God, as it were, to flame thus, let me remind you, too, that this fact of universal sinfulness puts us all in one class, no matter what may be the superficial difference.  Shakespeare and the Australian savage, the biggest brain and the smallest, the loftiest and the lowest of us, the purest and the foulest of us, we all come into the same order.  It is a question of classification.  ‘The Scripture hath concluded all under sin,’ that is to say, has shut all men up as in a prison.  You remember in the French Revolution, all manner of people were huddled indiscriminately into the same dungeon of the Paris prisons.  You would find a princess and some daughter of shame from the gutters; a boor from the country and a landlord, a count, a marquis, a savant, a philosopher and an illiterate workman, all together in the dungeons.  They kept up the distinctions of society and of class with a ghastly mockery, even to the very moment when the tumbrils came for them.  And so here are we all, in some sense inclosed within the solemn cells of this great prison-house, and whether we be wise or foolish, we are prisoners, whether we have titles or not, we are prisoners.  You may be a student, but you are a sinner:  you may be a rich Manchester merchant, but you are a sinner; you may be a man of rank, but you are a sinner.  Naaman went to Elisha and was very much offended because Elisha treated him as a leper who happened to be a nobleman.  He wanted to be treated as a nobleman who happened to be a leper.  And that is the way with a great many of us; we do not like to be driven into one class with all the crowd of evildoers.  But, my friend, ’there is no difference.’  ‘All have sinned and come short of the glory of God.’

II.  Again, there is no difference in the fact of God’s love to us.