Here, then, we find the next thing which grows out of man’s sense of separation both from nature and from his own best self.  It is his moral judgment on himself as well as on the world outside, and that power to judge shows that he is greater than either.  As Dr. Gordon says, “Every honest man lives under the shadow of his own rebuke.”  We can go far with the humanist in acknowledging the failures that are due to environment, to incompleteness, to ignorance; we do not forget the helpless multitude who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death; and we agree with the scientist that their helplessness foredooms them and that their fate cannot be laid to their charge.  But we go far beyond where scientist and humanist stop.  For we know that the deepest cause of human misery is not inheritance, is not environment, is not ignorance, is not incompleteness; it is the informed but the perverse human will.  Just as unhappiness is the consciousness of the divided mind, so guilt is this sense of the deliberately divided will.  Jonathan Swift knew that; on every yearly recurrence of the hour in which he came into the world, he cried lamentably, “Let the day perish wherein I was born.”

[Footnote 28:  Songs from the Clay, p. 40.]

The Lord Jesus knew it, too.  His teaching, unlike that of Paul, does not throw into the foreground the divided will and its accompanying sense of sin and guilt.  But he does not ignore it.  He brought it out with infinite tenderness but inexorable clearness in the parables of the lost sheep, the lost coin and the lost boy.  The sheep were but young and silly, they did not wish to be lost on the mountain-side; they knew no better; inexperience, ignorance were theirs, and for their sad estate they were not held responsible.  For them the compassionate shepherd sought until he found them in the wilds, took them, involuntary burdens, on his heart, brought them back to safety and the fold.  The coin had no native affinity with the dirt and grime of the careless woman’s house.  It was only a coin, attached to anklet or bracelet, having no power, no independence of its own; where it fell, there must it lie.  So with the lives set by fate in the refuse and grime of our industrial civilization, the pure minted gold effectually concealed by the obscurity and filth around.  For such lives, victims of environment, the Father will search, too, until they are found, taken up, and somewhere, in this world or another, restored to their native worth.  But the chief of the parables, and the one that has captured the imagination and subdued the heart of mankind, because it so true to the greater part of life, is the story of the lost boy.  For he was the real sinner and he was such because, knowing what he was about and able to choose, he desired to do wrong.  It was not ignorance, nor environment, nor inheritance, that led him into the far country.  It was its alien delights and their alien nature, for which as such he craved.  How subtle and certain is the word of Jesus here.  No shepherd seeks this wandering sheep; no householder searches for this lost coin.  The boy who willed to do wrong must stay with the swine among the husks until he wills to do right.  Then, when he desires to return, return is made possible and easy, but the responsibility is forever his.  The source of his misery is his own will.