expense of its fellow. That law is
reversed in the spiritual world; it is replaced by something else. If
a soul is to gain more abundant life, it must rise above the desire to
grasp and hold. The gambler is selling that beautiful thing which came
fresh from the hand of God, and is at once God's life and his; he is
destroying the present possibility of attaining to that higher life
which is the destiny of the soul. The Christ in him can find no
expression. And yet, my friends, realise this, however startling it
may seem, sin itself is a quest for God--a blundering quest, but a
quest for all that. The man who got dead drunk last night did so
because of the impulse within him to break through the barriers of his
limitations, to express himself, and to realise more abundant life.
His self-indulgence just came to that; he wanted if only for a brief
hour to live the larger life, to expand the soul, to enter untrodden
regions, and gather to himself new experience. That drunken debauch
was a quest for life, a quest for God. Men in their sinful follies
to-day, and their blank atheism, and their foul blasphemies, their
trampling upon things that are beautiful and good, are engaged in this
dim, blundering quest for God, whom to know is life eternal. The
_roue_ you saw in Piccadilly last night, who went out to corrupt
innocence and to wallow in filthiness of the flesh, was engaged in his
blundering quest for God. He is looking for Him along the line of the
wrong tendency; he has been gathering to himself what he took to be
more abundant life, "but sin, when it hath conceived bringeth forth
death"--death to the sinner as well as to his victim, death of what is
deepest and truest in the soul. Yet--I repeat it--all men are seeking
life, life more abundant, even in their selfishness and wrong-doing,
seeking life by the deathward road.

"Whatever crazy sorrow saith,
No life that breathes with human breath
Has ever truly longed for death.
'Tis life, whereof our nerves are scant,
O life, not death, for which we pant,
More life and fuller than I want."

On the following Sunday I preached a sermon entitled the "Nature of
Sin," in which the same point was reemphasised with even greater
distinctness, as the following extract will show:--

I think I startled some of you last Sunday morning when I happened to
remark that sin was, after all, a quest for God--a mistaken quest, but
none the less a quest for God, for