ake you free." And straightway jealous
Jewish ears caught at that word "free." "Free?" they cried, "Free? we be
Abraham's seed, and have never yet been in bondage to any man: how
sayest Thou, Ye shall be made free?" Yet even as they lift their hands
in protest Christ hears the clink of their fetters: "Verily, verily, I
say unto you, every one that committeth sin is the bond-servant--the
slave--of sin." "To whom ye present yourselves as servants unto
obedience, his servants--his slaves--ye are whom ye obey; whether of sin
unto death, or of obedience unto righteousness." Apostle and Lord mean
the same thing, true of us as it was true of the Jews: "Every one that
committeth sin is the slave of sin." (_b_) Further, Christ says, men are
in debt through their sin. In one parable He tells us of a certain
lender who had two debtors; the one owed five hundred pence, and the
other fifty; but neither had wherewith to pay. In another parable we
hear of a servant who owed his lord ten thousand talents--a gigantic
sum, vague in its vastness, "millions" as we might say--and he likewise
had not wherewith to pay. Further, in the application of each parable,
it is God to whom this unpayable debt is due. Now, it is just at this
point that our sense of sin to-day is weakest. The scientist, the
dramatist, the novelist are all proclaiming our responsibility toward
them that come after us; with pitiless insistence they are telling us
that the evil that men do lives after them, that it is not done with
when it is done. Yet, with all this, there may be no thought of God. It
is the consciousness not merely of responsibility, but of responsibility
God-ward, which needs to be strengthened. When we sin we may wrong
others much, we may wrong ourselves more, but we wrong God most of all;
and we shall never recover Christ's thought of sin until, like the
psalmist and the prodigal, we have learned to cry to Him, "Against Thee
have I sinned, and done that which is evil in Thy sight."

(3) But sin, in Christ's view of it, is not merely something a man does,
it is what he is. Go through Paul's long and dismal catalogue of "the
works of the flesh": "Fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness,
idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousies, wraths, factions,
divisions, heresies, envyings, drunkenness, revellings, and such like."
Yet even this is not the whole of the matter. Sin is more than the
sum-total of man's sins. The fruits are corrupt because the tree