he worst
harlot, thief, drunkard, profligate in your back streets may be more
innocent in their profligacy than you are in your respectability; and
that we may even come to this paradox, that the worse the act, as a
rule, the less guilty the doer? It is not such a paradox as it looks,
because, on the one hand, the presence of temptation, and, on the other
hand, the absence of light, make all the difference. And these people,
who could not have been anything else, are innocent in degradation as
compared with you, with all your education and culture, and
opportunities of going straight, and knowledge of Christ and His love.
The little transgressions that you do are far greater than the gross
ones that they do. 'But for the grace of God, there goes John Bradford,'
said the old preacher, when he saw a man going to the scaffold. And you
and I, if we know ourselves, will not think that we have an instance of
exaggeration, but only of the object nearest seeming the largest, when
Paul said 'Of whom I am chief.'

Only go and look for your sin in the way they look for Guy Fawkes at the
House of Commons before the session. Take a dark lantern, and go down
into the cellars. And If you do not find something there that will take
all the conceit out of you, it must be because you are very
short-sighted, or phenomenally self-complacent.

What does it matter though there be vineyards on the slopes of Vesuvius,
and bright houses nestling at its base, and beauty lying all around like
the dream of a god, if, when a man cranes his neck over the top of the
crater, he sees that that cone, so graceful on the outside, is seething
with fire and sulphur? Let us look down into the crater of our own
hearts, and what we see there may well make us feel as Paul did when he
said, 'Of whom I am chief.'

Now, such an estimate is perfectly consistent with a clear recognition
of any good that may be in the character and manifest in life. For the
same Paul who says, 'Of whom I am chief,' says, in the almost
contemporaneous letter sent to the same person, 'I have fought a good
fight; I have finished my course; I have kept the faith'; and he is the
same man who asserted, 'In nothing am I behind the very chiefest
apostles, though I be nothing.' The true Christian estimate of one's own
evil and sin does not in the least interfere with the recognition of
what God strengthens one to do, or of the progress which, by God's
grace, may have been made in holiness a