wall that has been shutting his soul out of its highest life.  He has been a drunkard, and he becomes a sober man.  He has been a cheat, and becomes a faithful man.  He has been a liar, and becomes a truthful man.  He has been a profligate, and he becomes a pure man.  What has happened to that man?  Shall he simply think of himself as one who has crushed this passion, shut down this part of his life?  Shall he simply think of himself as one who has taken a course of self-denial?  Nay.  It is self-indulgence that a man has really entered upon.  It is an indulgence of the deepest part of his own nature, not of his unreal nature.  He has risen and shaken himself like a lion, so that the dust has fallen from his mane, and all the great range of that life which God gave him to live lies before him.  This is the everlasting inspiration.  This is the illumination.  I don’t wonder that men refuse to give up evil if it simply seems to them to be giving up the evil way, and no vision opens before them of the thing that they may be and do.  I don’t wonder that, if the negative, restricting, imprisoning conception of the new life is all that a man gets hold of, he lingers again and again in the old life.  But just as soon as the great world opens before him then it is like a prisoner going out of the prison door.  Is there no lingering?  Does not the baser part of him cling to the old prison, to the ease and the provision for him, to the absence of anxiety and of energy?  I think there can hardly be a prisoner who, with any leap of heart, goes out of the prison door, when his term is finished, and does not even look into that black horror where he has been living, cast some lingering, longing look behind.  He comes to the exigencies, to the demands of life, to the necessity of making himself once more a true man among his fellow-men.  But does he stop?  He comes forth, and if there be the soul of a man in him still, he enters into the new life with enthusiasm, and finds the new powers springing in him to their work.  And if it be so with every special duty, then with that great thing which you and I are called upon to do—­the total acceptance by our nature of the will of God, the total acceptance by our nature of the mastery of Jesus Christ.  Oh! how this world has perverted words and meanings, that the mastery of Jesus Christ should seem to be the imprisonment and not the enfranchisement of the soul!  When I bring a flower out of the darkness and set it in the sun, and let the sunlight come streaming down upon it, and the flower knows the sunlight for which it was made and opens its fragrance and beauty; when I take a dark pebble and put it into the stream and let the silver water go coursing down over it and bringing forth the hidden color that was in the bit of stone, opening the nature that is in them, the flower and stone rejoice.  I can almost hear them sing in the field and in the stream.  What then?  Shall not man bring his nature out into the fullest