same shade, all sin of the
same gravity, no such teaching as that a man that tries according to
his light to do what is right stands on exactly the same level as the
man who flouts all such obligations, and has driven the chariots of
his lusts and passions through every law that may stand in his way.

But even whilst we have to insist upon that, that the teaching of my
text is not of an absolute identity of criminality, but only an
universal participation in criminality, do not let us forget that, if
you take the two extremes, and suppose it possible that there were a
best man in all the world, and a worst man in all the world, the
difference between these two is not perhaps so great as at first
sight it looks. For we have to remember that motives make actions,
and that you cannot judge of these by considering those, that 'as a
man thinketh in his heart,' and not as a man does with his hands, 'so
is he.' We have to remember, also, that there may be lives,
sedulously and immaculately respectable and pure, which are white
rather with the unwholesome leprosy of disease than with the
wholesome purity of health.

In Queen Elizabeth's time, the way in which they cleaned the hall of
a castle, the floor of which might be covered with remnants of food
and all manner of abominations, was to strew another layer of rushes
over the top of the filth, and then they thought themselves quite
neat and respectable. And that is what a great many of you do, cover
the filth well up with a sweet smelling layer of conventional
proprieties, and think yourselves clean, and the pinks of perfection.
God forbid that I should say one word that would seem to cast any
kind of slur upon the effort that any man makes to do what he knows
to be right, but this I proclaim, or rather my text proclaims for me,
that, giving full weight and value to all that, and admitting the
existence of variations in degree, the identity is deeper than the
diversity; and there is 'not a just man upon earth that doeth good
and sinneth not.'

Oh, dear friends! it is not a question of degree, but of direction;
not how far the ship has gone on her voyage, but how she heads. Good
and evil are the same in essence, whatever be their intensity and
whatever be their magnitude. Arsenic is arsenic, whether you have a
ton of it or a grain; and a very small dose will be enough to poison.
The Gospel starts with the assertion that there is no difference in
the fact of sin. The asserti