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.

Now, out of these depths of human life, these vast an