For the sinner
must have two things, both of them beyond his unaided getting, or he
will die. He must be released from his captivity. Who does not know
the terrible restlessness, that grows and feeds upon itself and then
does grow some more, of the man bound by evil and wanting to get out?
The torture of sin is that it deprives us of the power to express
ourselves. The cry of moral misery, therefore, is always the groaning
of the prisoner. Oh, for help to break the bars of my intolerable
and delicious sin that I may be myself once more! Oh, for some power
greater than I which, being greater, can set me free!
But more than the sinner wants to be free does he want to be kept.
Along with the passion for liberty is the desire for surrender. Again,
then, he wants something outside himself, some Being so far above the
world he lives in that it can take him, the whole of him, break his
life, shake it to its foundations, then pacify, compose it, make it
anew. He is so tired of his sin; he is so weary with striving; he
wants to relinquish it all; get far away from what he is; flee like
a bird to the mountain; lay down his life before the One like whom he
would be. So he wants power, he wants peace. He would be himself, he
would lose himself. He prays for freedom, he longs for captivity.
Now, out of these depths of human life, these vast antinomies of the
spirit, has arisen man's belief in a Saviour-God.
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