torpid or stinging them. I need
not dwell upon that, for it is plain to anybody that will think for a
moment that all sin separates between a man and God; and that from a
heart all seething and bubbling, like the crater of a volcano, with foul
liquids, and giving forth foul odours, there can come no love worth
calling so to God, nor any benevolence worth calling so to man. Wherever
there is sin, unrecognised, unconfessed, unpardoned, there there is a
black barrier built up between a man's heart and the yearning heart of
God on the other side. And until that barrier is swept away, until the
whole nature receives a new set, until it is delivered from the love of
evil, and from its self-centred absorption, and until conscience has
taken into grateful hands, if I might so say, the greatest of all gifts,
the assurance of the divine forgiveness, I, for one, do not believe that
deep, vital, and life-transforming love to God is possible. I know that
it is very unfashionable, I know it is exceedingly narrow teaching, but
it seems to me that it is Scriptural teaching; and it seems to me that
if we will strip it of the exaggerations with which it has often been
surrounded, and recognise that there may be a kind of instinctive and
occasional recognition of a divine love, there may be a yearning after a
clear light, and fuller knowledge of it, and yet all the while no real
love to God, rooted in and lording over and moulding the life, we shall
not find much in the history of the world, or in the experience of
ourselves or of others, to contradict the affirmation that you need the
cleansing of forgiveness, and the recognition of God's love in Jesus
Christ, before you can get love worth calling so in return to Him in
men's hearts.

Brethren, there is much to-day to shame Christian men in the singular
fact which is becoming more obvious daily, of a divorce between human
benevolence and godliness. It is a scandal that there should be so many
men in the world who make no pretensions to any sympathy with your
Christianity, and who set you an example of benevolence, self-sacrifice,
enthusiasm for humanity, as it is called. I believe that the one basis
upon which there can be solidly built benevolence to men is devotion to
God, because of God's great love to us in Jesus Christ. But I want to
stir, if I might not say sting, you and myself into a recognition of our
obligations to mankind, more stringent and compelling than we have ever
felt