Then the awakening begins.  Then can preaching stir the heart until deep answereth unto deep.  It can talk of the struggle with moral temptation and weakness; of the unstable temperament which oscillates between the gutter and the stars; of the perversion or abuse of impulses good in themselves; of the dreadful dualism of the soul.  For these are inheritances which have made life tragic in every generation for innumerable human beings.  Whoever needed to explain to a company of grown men and women what the cry of the soul for its release from passion is?  Every generation has its secret pessimists, brooding over the anarchy of the spirit, the issues of a distracted life.  We need not ask with Faust, “Where is that place which men call ’Hell’?” nor wait for Mephistopheles to answer,

  “Hell is in no set place, nor is it circumscribed,
  For where we are—­is Hell!”

Now, it is from such central and poignant experiences as these that men have been constrained to look outward for a God.  For these mark the very disintegration of personality, the utter dissipation of selfhood.  That is the inescapable horror of sin.  That is what we mean when we say sinners are lost; so they are, they are lost to their own selves.  With what discriminating truth the father in the parable of the lost boy speaks.  “This, my son,” he says, “was dead though he is alive again.”  So it is with us; being is the price we pay for sinning.  The more we do wrong the less we are.  How then shall we become alive again?

It is out of the shame and passion, the utter need of the human heart, which such considerations show to be real that men have built up their redemptive faiths.  For all moral victory is conditioned upon help from without.  To be sure each will and soul must strive desperately, even unto death, yet all that strife shall be in vain unless One stoops down from above and wrestles with us in the conflict.  For the sinner must have two things, both of them beyond his unaided getting, or he will die.  He must be released from his captivity.  Who does not know the terrible restlessness, that grows and feeds upon itself and then does grow some more, of the man bound by evil and wanting to get out?  The torture of sin is that it deprives us of the power to express ourselves.  The cry of moral misery, therefore, is always the groaning of the prisoner.  Oh, for help to break the bars of my intolerable and delicious sin that I may be myself once more!  Oh, for some power greater than I which, being greater, can set me free!

But more than the sinner wants to be free does he want to be kept.  Along with the passion for liberty is the desire for surrender.  Again, then, he wants something outside himself, some Being so far above the world he lives in that it can take him, the whole of him, break his life, shake it to its foundations, then pacify, compose it, make it anew.  He is so tired of his sin; he is so weary with striving; he wants to relinquish it all; get far away from what he is; flee like a bird to the mountain; lay down his life before the One like whom he would be.  So he wants power, he wants peace.  He would be himself, he would lose himself.  He prays for freedom, he longs for captivity.