an hear words, I can see things, but they will have power over me only
in the measure that something in me answers to the words and the
things." "I was so tempted," says a man, "and I yielded," which means
that the desire already there came into contact with the opportunity to
gratify it, and in what struggle there was, the desire was greater than
the will-power put out to control it. To say that the sight of
opportunity to do evil often makes evil done may be true, but the sight
does not make the evil, it only discovers the evil ready for the sight.

In the first place, then, the Apostle admonishes us, that we cannot
refer the guilt of our sin, or the responsibility for moral failure, to
causes and sources outside ourselves. We may do that with failure of
many kinds, but never in a case of conscious moral obliquity. The
Apostle James would have agreed with the greater Apostle when he said:
"I find a law within me, that when I would do good, evil is ever
present"; but he would not the less have stood his ground and said:
"Call it a law if you like, but it is not, and is not meant to be,
beyond our control. It is one thing to be tempted, it is another thing
to fall." Every man is tempted when he is drawn away of his own lust
and enticed.

Let us allow at this point for a word of qualification, or we may find
ourselves in confusion. As I have just hinted, we must not confound
moral guilt and its consequences with the consequences of troubles and
failures over which we have next to no control.

Here is a man, let us say, who is a hard worker, temperate,
enterprising, and upright. He is making headway in a certain business.
But a powerful combination is formed in the same line, which offers him
the two alternatives of absorption or almost certain ruin. He decides
to hold out against it, to find possibly after a time that his business
is gone, and with it his capital, and he himself in a world that
apparently has no further use for him. Then, soured and bitter,
nursing a sense of wrong, he gradually parts with his self-respect,
probably takes to drink, and goes down below the hope-mark of social
redemption.

The man--and you probably have known such an one--may, or he may not,
have been responsible for his business disasters. He had a right to
trust to his own judgment, and providing that he did not choose to
enter the combination, he was justified in making a struggle for his
own independence. Whether his de