en think that the evil thing is the glorious
thing. If the evil thing be that which Christ has told us that the evil
thing is--which I have no time to tell you now--if every sin that you do
is not simply a stain upon your soul, but is keeping you out from some
great and splendid thing which you might do, then is there any sort of
splendor and glory about sin? How about the sins that you did when you
were young men? How can you look back upon those sins and think what
your life might have been if it had been pure from the beginning, think
what you might have been if from the very beginning you had caught sight
of what it was to be a man? And then your boy comes along. What are the
men in this town doing largely in many and many a house, but letting
their boys believe that the sins of their early life are glorious
things, except that those things which they did, the base and wretched
things that they were doing when they were fifteen and twenty and
twenty-five and thirty years old, are the true career of a human nature,
are the true entrance into human life? The miserable talk about sowing
wild oats, about getting through the necessary conditions of life before
a man comes to solemnity! Shame upon any man who, having passed through
the sinful conditions and habits and dispositions of his earlier life,
has not carried out of them an absolute shame for them, that shall let
him say to his boy, by word and by every utterance of his life within
the house where he and the boy live together, "Refrain, for they are
abominable things!" To get rid of the glamour of sin, to get rid of the
idea that it is a glorious thing to be dissipated instead of being
concentrated to duty, to get rid of the idea that to be drunken and to
be lustful are true and noble expressions of our abounding human life,
to get rid of any idea that sin is aught but imprisonment, is to make
those who come after us, and to make ourselves in what of life is left
for us, gloriously ambitious for the freedom of purity, for a full
entrance into that life over which sin has no dominion. And yet, at the
same time, don't you see that while sin thus becomes contemptible when
we think about the great illustration of the will of God and Jesus
Christ, don't you see how also it puts on a new horror? That which I
thought I was doing in the halls of my imprisonment I have really been
doing within the possible world of God in which I might have been free.
The moment I see what l