such things any more.  With the departure of this possibility, and with the hope of confession hereafter to those we have wronged, will depart also the power over us of the evil things we have done, and so we shall be saved from them also.  The bad that lives in us, our evil judgments, our unjust desires, our hate and pride and envy and greed and self-satisfaction—­these are the souls of our sins, our live sins, more terrible than the bodies of our sins, namely the deeds we do, inasmuch as they not only produce these loathsome things, but make us loathsome as they.  Our wrong deeds are our dead works; our evil thoughts are our live sins.  These, the essential opposites of faith and love, the sins that dwell and work in us, are the sins from which Jesus came to deliver us.  When we turn against them and refuse to obey them, they rise in fierce insistence, but the same moment begin to die.  We are then on the Lord’s side, as he has always been on ours, and he begins to deliver us from them.

Anything in you, which, in your own child, would make you feel him not so pleasant as you would have him, is something wrong.  This may mean much to one, little or nothing to another.  Things in a child which to one parent would not seem worth minding, would fill another with horror.  After his moral development, where the one parent would smile, the other would look aghast, perceiving both the present evil, and the serpent-brood to follow.  But as the love of him who is love, transcends ours as the heavens are higher than the earth, so must he desire in his child infinitely more than the most jealous love of the best mother can desire in hers.  He would have him rid of all discontent, all fear, all grudging, all bitterness in word or thought, all gauging and measuring of his own with a different rod from that he would apply to another’s.  He will have no curling of the lip; no indifference in him to the man whose service in any form he uses; no desire to excel another, no contentment at gaining by his loss.  He will not have him receive the smallest service without gratitude; would not hear from him a tone to jar the heart of another, a word to make it ache, be the ache ever so transient.  From such, as from all other sins, Jesus was born to deliver us; not, primarily, or by itself, from the punishment of any of them.  When all are gone, the holy punishment will have departed also.  He came to make us good, and therein blessed children.

One master-sin is at the root of all the rest.  It is no individual action, or anything that comes of mood, or passion; it is the non-recognition by the man, and consequent inactivity in him, of the highest of all relations, that relation which is the root and first essential condition of every other true relation of or in the human soul.  It is the absence in the man of harmony with the being whose thought is the man’s existence, whose word is the man’s power of thought.  It is true that, being thus his offspring, God, as St Paul affirms,