illumination, and surprise himself by the things that he might do?  Oh! the littleness of the lives that we are living!  Oh! the way in which we fail to comprehend, or when we do comprehend, deny to ourselves the bigness of that thing which it is to be a man, to be a child of God!  Sometimes it dawns upon us that we can see it opening into the vision of these men and women in the New Testament.  Sometimes there opens to us the picture of this thing that we might be, and then there are truly the trial moments of our life.  Then we lift up ourselves and claim our liberty or, dastardly or cowardly, slink back into the sluggish imprisonment in which we have been living.  How does all this affect that which we are continually conscious of, urging upon ourselves and upon one another?  How does it affect the whole question of a man’s sins?  Oh! these sins, the things we know so well!  As we sit here and stand here one entire hour, as we talk in this sort of way, everybody knows the weaknesses of his own nature, the sins of his own soul.  Don’t you know it?  What shall we think about those sins?  It seems to me, my friends, that all this great picture of the liberty into which Christ sets man, in the first place does one thing which we are longing to see done in the world.  It takes away the glamour and the splendor from sin.  It breaks that spell by which men think that the evil thing is the glorious thing.  If the evil thing be that which Christ has told us that the evil thing is—­which I have no time to tell you now—­if every sin that you do is not simply a stain upon your soul, but is keeping you out from some great and splendid thing which you might do, then is there any sort of splendor and glory about sin?  How about the sins that you did when you were young men?  How can you look back upon those sins and think what your life might have been if it had been pure from the beginning, think what you might have been if from the very beginning you had caught sight of what it was to be a man?  And then your boy comes along.  What are the men in this town doing largely in many and many a house, but letting their boys believe that the sins of their early life are glorious things, except that those things which they did, the base and wretched things that they were doing when they were fifteen and twenty and twenty-five and thirty years old, are the true career of a human nature, are the true entrance into human life?  The miserable talk about sowing wild oats, about getting through the necessary conditions of life before a man comes to solemnity!  Shame upon any man who, having passed through the sinful conditions and habits and dispositions of his earlier life, has not carried out of them an absolute shame for them, that shall let him say to his boy, by word and by every utterance of his life within the house where he and the boy live together, “Refrain, for they are abominable things!” To get rid of the glamour of sin, to get rid of the idea that it is a glorious thing to be dissipated instead of