there were no
life, there would be no pain. We may say therefore that pain is life,
or some finite expression of the universal life, seeking to burst
through something that fetters and hinders it. Apply this to the
region of morals and let us see how it works out. If a man has been
living for self, he has been making a mistake and preparing for himself
a harvest of pain, for sooner or later the divine life within him, the
truer, deeper self, will assert itself against the decisive efforts of
sin. It is just as impossible for a man to go on eternally living
apart from the universal life as it is for a sand castle to shut out
the ocean; the returning tide would break down the puny barriers and
destroy everything that tends to separate between the soul and God.
For, after all, what is our life but God's? To try to keep it for
ourselves is like trying to catch and imprison a sun ray by drawing the
blinds. To save the self we must serve the All. When, therefore, we
remember that the spirit of man and the spirit of God are one, we know
of a surety that the infinite life behind the human spirit will assert
itself irresistibly against the endeavours of sin to enclose that
spirit within finite conditions. The essence of sin is the
declaration, "Mine is not thine, and I shall live for mine alone."
This is trying to live for the finite; it is enclosing the soul within
barriers; those barriers must be broken if the soul is to be saved, and
broken they will be just because the deeper self of every man is
already one with God. In the stable-yard of my house there was at one
time a tree, which was cut down and the place where it grew covered
with flagstones and a wall built round it. But the roots of the tree
were not removed, and so that buried life has reasserted itself, the
flagstones have been shattered, and now the wall is coming down. Here
is a figure of our moral experience. A man may go on living for self
all through a long career; he may bury his better nature deep
underneath the hard shell of materialism and self-indulgence, but it is
all in vain; sooner or later, on this side of death or on the other,
that buried life shall rise in power and all barriers be swept away.
This uprising of the Christ in the individual soul, for such it is,
must inevitably mean pain to the man whose true life has been entombed
in selfishness. The pain may begin here or on the farther side of the
change called death, but it is itself