t of that conviction. There
must be some external standard by which men may be convinced of their
sinfulness, for they carry no such standard within them. Your conscience
is only _you_ judging on moral questions, and, of course, as you change,
it will change too. A man's whole state determines the voice with which
conscience shall speak to him, and so the worse he is, and the more he
needs it, the less he has it. The rebels cut the telegraph wires. The
waves break the bell that hangs on the reef, and so the black rocks get
many a wreck to gnaw with their sharp teeth. A man makes his conscience
dumb by the very sins that require a conscience trumpet-tongued to
reprehend them. And therefore it needs that God should speak from
Heaven, and say to us, '_Thou_ art the man,' or else we pass by all
these grave things that I am trying to urge upon you now, and fall back
upon our complacency and our levity and our unwillingness to take stock
of ourselves, and front the facts of our condition. And so we build up a
barrier between ourselves and God, and God's grace, which nothing short
of that grace and an omnipotent love and an all-powerful Redeemer can
ever pull down.

I wish to urge in a few words, yet with much earnestness, this thought,
that until we have laid to heart God's message about our own personal
sinfulness we have not got to the place where we can in the least
understand the true meaning of His Gospel, or the true work of His Son.
May I say that I, for one, am old-fashioned enough to look with great
apprehension on certain tendencies of present-day presentations of
Christianity which, whilst they dwell much upon the social blessings
which it brings, do seem to me to be in great peril of obscuring the
central characteristic of the Gospel, that it is addressed to sinful
men, and that the only way by which individuals can come to the
possession of any of its blessings is by coming as penitent sinners, and
casting themselves on the mercy of God in Jesus Christ? The beginning of
all lies here, where Paul puts it, 'the Scripture hath herded all men,'
in droves, into the prison, that it might have mercy upon all.

Dear friend, as the old proverb has it, deceit lurks in generalities. I
have no doubt you are perfectly willing to admit that all are sinful.
Come a little closer to the truth, I beseech you, and say each is
sinful, and I am one of the captives.

III. And so, lastly, the breaker of the prison-house.

I need no