or been the very best man that
you could be. You! what are you? Again I say, The child of God, and this
which you have been, what is it? Look over it, see how selfish it has
been, see how material it has been, how it has lived in the depths when
it might have lived on the heights, see how it has lived in the little
narrow range of selfishness when it might have been as broad as all
humanity, nay, when it might have been as the God of humanity. Don't
dare to say that in any day of your life, or in all your life together,
you have done the best that you could. The Pharisee said it when he went
up into the temple, and all the world has looked on with mingled pity
and scorn at the blindness of the man who stood there and paraded his
faithfulness; while all the world has bent with a pity that was near to
love, a pity that was full of sympathy because man recognized his
condition and experience, for the poor creature grovelling upon the
pavement, unwilling and unable even to look upon the altar, but who,
standing afar off, said, "God be merciful to me a sinner!" Whatever else
you say, don't say, "I have been the very best I could." That means that
you have not merely lived in the rooms of your imprisonment, but that
you have been satisfied to count them the only possible rooms of your
life, and that the great halls of your liberty have never opened
themselves before you. Shall not they open themselves somehow to us
to-day, my friends? Shall we not turn away from this hour and go back
into our business, into our offices, into the shops, into the crowded
streets, bearing new thoughts of the lives that we might live, feeling
the fetters on our hands and feet, feeling many things as fetters which
we have thought of as the ornament and glory of our life, determined to
be unsatisfied forever until these fetters shall be stricken off and we
have entered into the full liberty which comes to those alone who are
dedicated to the service of God, to the completion of their own nature,
to the acceptance of the grace of Christ, and to the attainment of the
eternal glory of the spiritual life, first here and then hereafter,
never hereafter, it may be, except here and now, certainly here and now,
as the immediate, pressing privilege and duty of our lives? So let us
stand up on our feet and know ourselves in all the richness and in all
the awfulness of our human life. Let us know ourselves children of God,
and claim the liberty which God has gi