ely
innocent, and that somebody said, 'Oh, do not be a milksop! come along
and see life,' and you thought it was fine to shake off the shackles
that your poor old mother used to try to put upon your limbs? And what
have you made of it? I will tell you what a great many young men have
made of it--I have seen scores of them in the forty years that I have
been preaching here: 'His bones are full of the iniquity of his youth,
which shall lie down with him in the dust.'

There is a slavery which is blessedness, and there is a slavery which at
first is delightsome to the worst part of us, and afterwards becomes
bitter and deadly. And it is the bondage of sin, the bondage to my worst
self, the bondage to my indulged passions, the bondage to other men, the
bondage to the material world. Jesus Christ speaks to each of us in His
great sacrifice, by which He says to us, 'The Son will make you free,
and you shall be free indeed.' The Lord has bought us. Have you let Him
emancipate you from all your bondage? Dear friends, bear with me if I
press again upon you, I pray God that it may ring in your ears till you
can answer that question, Jesus Christ having bought me, do I belong to
Him?

III. And now, lastly, notice the runaways.

Did it ever occur to you what a pathetic force there is in Peter's
picking out that word 'denying' as the shorthand expression for all
sorts of sins? Who was it that thrice denied that he knew Him? That
experience went very deep into the Apostle; and here, as I take it, is a
most significant illustration of his penitent remembrance of his past
life, all the more significant because of its reticence. The allusion is
one that nobody could catch that did not know his past, but which to
those who did know it was full of meaning and of pathos:--'Denying the
Lord, as _I_ did on that dismal morning, in the High Priest's palace. I
am speaking about it, for I know what it comes to, and the tears that
will follow after.'

But what I desire to press upon you, dear friends, is just this: That in
that view of the lives of people who are not Christians there is
suggested to us the essential sinfulness, the black ingratitude, and the
absolute folly of refusing to acknowledge the claims of Him to whom we
belong, and who has bought us at such a price. You can do it by word,
and perhaps some of us are not guiltless in that respect. You can do it
by paring down the character and office of Jesus Christ, and minimising
the