masses of our large populations? Was there no room for the man
who penalizes body and soul to straining-point for words and thoughts
that shall inspire and hearten men to steer their lives by the higher
stars, those eternal principles of truth and right? Was there no room
for a woman of the Salvation Army who is out of some hideous slum for a
moment's breathing, before returning to it with a great self-renouncing
life of love and healing?

But take the picture as the artist's impression of the ail-but
universal indifference about Him who is yet declared to be the soul and
centre of our Scriptures, our creeds, and our religious life, and how
do we explain it? Or if we put the artist's impression aside, and on
our own account face the truth which, for the purposes of constructive
art, he may have exaggerated, is there any less need that we should
ask: Why is Christ despised and rejected of men? Why is it that they
do not come unto Him that they may have life? The answers are legion.
To my thinking, they resolve themselves into practically one. Before
we can know Christ, before we can understand Christ, before we can come
to Christ, we must come to ourselves. And not a face on that crowded
canvas suggests a hope that he, or she, had taken an honest step in
this all-determining direction. Before I can look to Christ as my
Saviour I must know that I need a Saviour. Before I can realize my
need of salvation from sin I must realize that I am a sinner. So much,
if not all, turns there. It is not every man who feels that he is a
sinner because he talks about being one. But let him feel it, and out
of the knowledge will come his saving health, or the death that dies.

It is declared to be the work of the Holy Spirit to convince men of
sin, and the unbelief growing out of sin. Analyse the causes of
indifference about the things that belong to our peace, and you find
that for the most part they resolve themselves into sin, and the
unbelief that follows sin, as consequence comes out of cause. I know
with what impatience the world turns from what is called the
evangelical teaching about the nature and effects of sin. And we need
not go outside the Church to find the same impatience, not to say
contempt. We have in our pulpits men who represent sin to us as good
in the making. It is in some sense a necessary means to an end. They
speak of arrested development, of defect of will, of inheritances and
surroundings, of