pening of a gate, the pushing back
of a veil,--shall a man believe those things as imprisonments of his
nature, and shall it not make him larger? Shall it not be the indulgence
of his life when he enters into the great certainties which so are
offered to his belief, believing them in his own way? Let us always feel
that to accept a new belief is no to build a wall beyond which we cannot
pass, but is to open the door to a great fresh, free region, in which
our souls are to live. And just so it is when we come to the moral
things of life. The man puts aside some sinfulness. He breaks down the
wall that has been shutting his soul out of its highest life. He has
been a drunkard, and he becomes a sober man. He has been a cheat, and
becomes a faithful man. He has been a liar, and becomes a truthful man.
He has been a profligate, and he becomes a pure man. What has happened
to that man? Shall he simply think of himself as one who has crushed
this passion, shut down this part of his life? Shall he simply think of
himself as one who has taken a course of self-denial? Nay. It is
self-indulgence that a man has really entered upon. It is an indulgence
of the deepest part of his own nature, not of his unreal nature. He has
risen and shaken himself like a lion, so that the dust has fallen from
his mane, and all the great range of that life which God gave him to
live lies before him. This is the everlasting inspiration. This is the
illumination. I don't wonder that men refuse to give up evil if it
simply seems to them to be giving up the evil way, and no vision opens
before them of the thing that they may be and do. I don't wonder that,
if the negative, restricting, imprisoning conception of the new life is
all that a man gets hold of, he lingers again and again in the old life.
But just as soon as the great world opens before him then it is like a
prisoner going out of the prison door. Is there no lingering? Does not
the baser part of him cling to the old prison, to the ease and the
provision for him, to the absence of anxiety and of energy? I think
there can hardly be a prisoner who, with any leap of heart, goes out of
the prison door, when his term is finished, and does not even look into
that black horror where he has been living, cast some lingering, longing
look behind. He comes to the exigencies, to the demands of life, to the
necessity of making himself once more a true man among his fellow-men.
But does he stop? He comes forth,