ld be found in
cities. Nature always spoke in Him, convention never. In His
treatment of sin it is always the voice of Nature that we hear
triumphing over the verdicts of convention. The sins which convention
regards as inexpiable are sins of passion; the sins which it excuses
are sins of temper, such as greed, malice, craft, unkindness, cruelty.
Jesus entirely reverses the scale. His pity is reserved for outcasts,
His harshest words are addressed to those whom the world calls good.
Folly He views with infinite compassion--the foolish man is as a lost
sheep whose very helplessness invokes our pity. But for the man of
hard and self-sufficient nature, whose very righteousness is a mixture
of prudence and egoism, He has only words of flame. An offense against
virtue counts for less with Him than an offense against love. No
wonder the Pharisees called Him a blasphemer! Were the true nature of
Christ's teaching understood to-day many who profess to revere Him
would join in the same accusation. What more offensive and unpalatable
truth could be presented to mankind than this on which Jesus constantly
insists, that sins of temper are much more harmful than sins of
passion, that they spring from a more incurable malignancy of nature,
that they produce far wider and more disastrous suffering?

Yet the truth is clear enough to all broadly truthful and simple
natures, which are not bewildered by conventional views of right and
wrong. Who has occasioned more suffering, the youth who has sinned
against himself in wild folly and repented, or the man who has planned
his life with that cold craft and deliberate cruelty which sacrifices
everything to self-advantage? Can any human mind measure the various
and almost infinite wrongs committed by the man who piles up through
years of sordid avarice an unjust fortune? Who can count the broken
hearts in the pathway of that implacable ambition which "wades through
slaughter to a throne"? These things may not be apparent to the man
whose nature is subdued to the hue of that artificial society in which
he lives, a society which permits such crimes to pass unquestioned.
They are certainly not perceived by the criminals themselves. To-day,
as in the day of Christ, they "devour widows' houses, and for a
pretense make long prayers," save, perhaps, that more blind than the
ancient Pharisees, their prayers seem real, and they themselves are
unconscious of pretense. Now also, as then, t