ome to this well-endowed young man in the year the great king
died.

The fortunate young man stood out in the open confessing his sense of
moral need. There in the place of worship in that high and serious
mood which followed upon the death of the king, he caught a fresh
vision of God. "I saw the Lord high and lifted up, sitting upon His
throne. I saw Him surrounded with the winged seraphs. And one of them
cried to another, Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord of hosts! The whole
earth is full of His glory."

The very sight of the unstained purity of Him "unto whom all hearts are
open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid," brought
this young man to his knees. He knelt in the dust and beat upon his
breast and told the sins of his life. "Woe is me, I am undone. I am a
man of unclean lips. I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips.
And mine eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts."

The man who has no sense of sin has little sense of any sort. If we
say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves or else we lie. Where is the
man who can stand up in the presence of those who know him and say,
"Every deed that I have done was done in honour and integrity. Every
word that has fallen from my lips has been spoken in truth and in
kindliness. Every desire which I have harboured in my soul has been
one upon which the eye of my Maker might rest with approval."

Can you say that? I am frank to confess that I cannot. I have done
wrong. I feel my need of the divine mercy. I want forgiveness,
cleansing and renewal. And every man who is honest enough to look
himself in the face, without flinching, will be moved to make the same
confession. It is up out of those moments of contrition when men are
humbled and broken before God that the spiritual impulses come which
are to beat back the forces of evil and make this earth at last as fair
as the sky.

I care not what the man's outward station may be--he may live on the
Avenue or he may live in the slums; he may be clothed in purple or he
may be dressed in rags; he wear a Phi Beta Kappa key or he may be so
untaught that he has to make his mark when he signs a mortgage--in any
event here is a prayer which will fit his lips--it fits every pair of
lips: "God be merciful to me, a sinner."

In that one brief sentence we have the four main terms of religious
experience. "God," the object of religion, the ground of all finite
existence, the basis of all our hop