th a different rod from that he would apply to another's.
He will have no curling of the lip; no indifference in him to the man
whose service in any form he uses; no desire to excel another, no
contentment at gaining by his loss. He will not have him receive the
smallest service without gratitude; would not hear from him a tone to
jar the heart of another, a word to make it ache, be the ache ever so
transient. From such, as from all other sins, Jesus was born to deliver
us; not, primarily, or by itself, from the punishment of any of them.
When all are gone, the holy punishment will have departed also. He came
to make us good, and therein blessed children.

One master-sin is at the root of all the rest. It is no individual
action, or anything that comes of mood, or passion; it is the
non-recognition by the man, and consequent inactivity in him, of the
highest of all relations, that relation which is the root and first
essential condition of every other true relation of or in the human
soul. It is the absence in the man of harmony with the being whose
thought is the man's existence, whose word is the man's power of
thought. It is true that, being thus his offspring, God, as St Paul
affirms, cannot be far from any one of us: were we not in closest
contact of creating and created, we could not exist; as we have in us
no power to be, so have we none to continue being; but there is a closer
contact still, as absolutely necessary to our well-being and highest
existence, as the other to our being at all, to the mere capacity of
faring well or ill. For the highest creation of God in man is his will,
and until the highest in man meets the highest in God, their true
relation is not yet a spiritual fact. The flower lies in the root, but
the root is not the flower. The relation exists, but while one of the
parties neither knows, loves, nor acts upon it, the relation is, as it
were, yet unborn. The highest in man is neither his intellect nor his
imagination nor his reason; all are inferior to his will, and indeed, in
a grand way, dependent upon it: his will must meet God's--a will
_distinct_ from God's, else were no _harmony_ possible between them. Not
the less, therefore, but the more, is all God's. For God creates in the
man the power to will His will. It may cost God a suffering man can
never know, to bring the man to the point at which he will will His
will; but when he is brought to that point, and declares for the truth,
that i