naged to accumulate about as many offences to as many
people in one deed as was possible. For, as a king he had sinned against
his nation, as a friend he had sinned against his companion, as a
captain he had sinned against his brave subordinate, as a husband he had
sinned against his wife, and he had sinned against Bathsheba. And yet,
with all that tangle of offences against all these people, he says,
'Against Thee, Thee only.' Yes! Because, accurately speaking, the _sin_
had reference to God, and to God alone. And I wish for myself and for
you to cultivate the habit of connecting, thus, all our actions, and
especially our imperfections and our faults, with the thought of God,
that we may learn how universal is the enclosure of man in this dreadful
prison-house.

II. And so, I come, in the second place, to look at the guardian of the
prison.

That is a strange phrase of my text attributing the shutting of men up
in this prison-house to the merciful revelation of God in the Scripture.
And it is made still more striking and strange by another edition of
the same expression in the Epistle to the Romans, where Paul directly
traces the 'concluding all in disobedience' to God Himself.

There may be other subtle thoughts connected with that expression which
I do not need to enter upon now. But one that I would dwell upon, for a
moment, is this, that one great purpose of Scripture is to convince us
that we are sinful in God's sight. I do not need to remind you, I
suppose, how that was, one might almost say, the dominant intention of
the whole of the ceremonial and moral law of Israel, and explains its
many else inexplicable and apparently petty commandments and
prohibitions. They were all meant to emphasise the difference between
right and wrong, obedience and disobedience, and so to drive home to
men's hearts the consciousness that they had broken the commandments of
the living God. And although the Gospel comes with a very different
guise from that ancient order, and is primarily gift and not law, a
Gospel of forgiveness, and not the promulgation of duty or the
threatening of condemnation, yet it, too, has for one of its main
purposes, which must be accomplished in us before it can reach its
highest aim in us, the kindling in men's hearts of the same
consciousness that they are sinful men in God's sight.

Ah, brethren, we all need it. There is nothing that we need more than to
have driven deep into us the penetrating poin