s healthy revolution? Looking at men as they actually are, and
considering how many forces are banded together to exclude the knowledge
of sin, how worldly interest demands that no brand shall be affixed to
this and that action, how the customs we are brought up in require us to
take a lenient view of this and that immorality, how we deceive
ourselves by sacrificing sins we do not care for in order to retain sins
that are in our blood, how the resistance of certain sins makes us a
prey to self-righteousness and delusion--considering what we have learnt
of the placidity with which men content themselves with a life they know
is not the highest, does there seem to be any instrument by which a true
and humbling sense of sin can be introduced to the mind?

Christ, knowing that men were about to put Him to death because He had
tried to convict them of sin, confidently predicts that His servants
would by His Spirit's aid convince the world of sin and of this in
particular--that they had not believed in Him. That very death which
chiefly exhibits human sin has, in fact, become the chief instrument in
making men understand and hate sin. There is no consideration from which
the deceitfulness of sin will not escape, nor any fear which the
recklessness of sin will not brave, nor any authority which self-will
cannot override but only this: Christ has died for me, to save me from
my sin, and I am sinning still, not regarding His blood, not meeting His
purpose. It was when the greatness and the goodness of Christ were
together let in to Peter's mind that he fell on his face before Him,
saying, "Depart from me, O Lord, for I am a sinful man." And the
experience of thousands is recorded in that more recent confession:

"In evil long I took delight, unawed by shame or fear,
Till a new object struck my sight and stopped my wild career:
I saw One hanging on a tree in agonies and blood.
Who fixed His languid eyes on me as near His cross I stood.
Sure never till my latest breath can I forget that look;
It seemed to charge me with His death, though not a word He spoke."

Of other convictions we may get rid; the consequences of sin we may
brave, or we may disbelieve that in our case sin will produce any very
disastrous fruits; but in the death of Christ we see, not what sin may
possibly do in the future, but what it actually has done in the past. In
presence of the death of Christ we cannot any longer make a mock of s