selfishly is to lose it;
to seek it unselfishly is both to gain and to give it. The good man
and the bad man are seeking the same thing in opposite ways.

During the recent New Theology controversy the editor of the _British
Weekly_, in the course of an attack upon my teaching, printed a number
of extracts from my sermons in order to convince his readers that that
teaching was objectionable and false. In every case the extract was
carefully removed from its context and therefore conveyed quite a
misleading impression to the mind of the reader. One of these extracts
was from a sermon on "More Abundant Life," preached in the City Temple
on Sunday morning, March 18, 1906. As this extract has been widely
circulated, perhaps I may be pardoned for giving it here along with the
context. All that the editor chose to print was a part of the
paragraph in which sin was described as a quest for God, and yet he
must have known perfectly well that to take that paragraph out of its
setting was to do an injustice both to the preacher and to the subject.

Observe the sharp antithesis between the "thief or the robber" on the
one hand, and the "Good Shepherd" on the other. These two stand for
two opposing tendencies that have run through all nature and all human
life. All nature through, all history through, two conflicting
tendencies have been discernible. These are ever at war, and they ever
will be until the whole world has been subdued to Christ, and is filled
with the fulness of the life of God. These two tendencies we may
describe as the deathward and the lifeward respectively. The words are
not very satisfactory because the deathward tendency masquerades as the
lifeward tendency, and the lifeward tendency, before fruition, looks
like the deathward one. In nature, as Romans viii. tells us, "We know
that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until
now." Nature is cruel, "red in tooth and claw." The deathward
tendency is what I may call the self-ward tendency in the upward
struggle of all organic forms, that is, one organism only exists at the
expense of other organisms. Yet at a certain stage in evolution this
principle of the survival of the fittest at the expense of the rest
gives way to a counter principle, that of the fitting of as many as
possible to survive. The thief tendency gives way to the shepherd
tendency, self-love to mother-love, the struggle to survive to the
struggle for the lif