about their
sins.' Men are not sorry for sin (except with the seedy remorse of 'the
morning after') until their sin has come into contact with love. The more
vital a young man is, the less will he brood in self-regard over his
wrongdoing. "Anyhow, I have lived," he will say. But if it comes home to
him what his wrongdoing has done to another who loves him, then he begins
to be sorry. "I didn't care," he will say, "for myself. I had my fling.
But now I see that what I did has broken my mother's heart. I wish to God
I hadn't done it."

Our religion must begin from God. It must spring out of love fuller and
more hungry than our desirous hearts. It must spring out of love, not--how
could it?--out of our love for God, but out of His love for us. If God's
love for us, manifested in the utterly real and suffering love of Jesus,
and in no insipid fancy of our sentimental moments, wins its way past our
guard and over the barriers of self, hatred of sin and sorrow for sin will
follow. But it is a question of order: first, what God is; second, what we
are. The more vivid the first is to a man, the more inevitable his candid
consciousness of the second. The more he is taken captive by the assurance
that God is his Father, the more glaring it will be to him that he is an
unworthy son. And the more men set out to give effect to their sonship in
service for the kingdom of God, the more they will realise their strange
impotence. The dreadful hiatus between aspiration and performance, between
acknowledged and realised ideals will widen. The eager impulse to
disregard self and to serve God with love and praise and joy, will be
found horridly at variance with a natural and rooted impulse towards
self-devotion and indulgence. The worship and praise of God, not only in
thought and word but in deed, will stumble and fall short of its goal--and
then the tears of tragic failure will start and the cry of despair ring
out. It was so with Peter in the porch and Paul beaten down in bondage
under the Law. "Who shall deliver us from the body of this death?"

I think there is no fear but that, if we do set out to put into practice
our inheritance as sons of God, we shall come to the Cross of Christ in
genuine "Rock-of-ages" fashion, bringing nothing to it in the end, except
our lovelessness. His, after all and in fact, was the one, free, utterly
loving and obedient offering of self to the Father. He did something
others could not do--He died for them