"But I prayed for thee."

To any reader who has any feeling or imagination, what do these
short sentences mean? What can they mean, from the lips of a thinker
so clear and so serious, and a friend so tender? What but
unspeakable peril? The language has for us a certain strangeness;
but it shows plainly enough that, to Jesus' mind, the disciples, and
Peter in particular, stood in danger, a danger so urgent that it
called for the Saviour's prayer. So much it meant to him, and he
himself tells Peter what he had realized, what he had done, in
language that could not be mistaken or forgotten. To the nature of
the danger that sin involves, we shall return. Meanwhile we may
consider what Jesus means by sin before we discuss its consequences.

"The Son of Man," says Jesus, in a sentence that is famous but still
insufficiently studied, "is come to seek and to save that which is
lost" (Luke 19:10). Our rule has been to endeavour to give to the
terms of Jesus the connotation he meant them to carry. The scholar
will linger over the "Son of Man"--a difficult phrase, with a
literary and linguistic history that is very complicated. For the
present purpose the significant words are at the other end of the
sentence. What does Jesus mean by "lost"? It is a strong word, the
value of which we have in some degree lost through familiarity. And
whom would he describe as "lost"? We have once more to recall his
criticism of Peter--that Peter "thought like a man and not like God"
(Mark 8:33)--and to be on our guard lest we think too quickly and
too slightly. We may remark, too, that for Jesus sin is not, as for
Paul and theologians in general, primarily an intellectual problem.
He does not use the abstraction Sin as Paul does. But the clear,
steady gaze turned on men and women misses little.

There are four outstanding classes, whom he warns of the danger of
hell in one form or other.

To begin, there is the famous description of the Last Judgement
(Matt. 25:31-46)--a description in itself not altogether new. Plenty
of writers and thinkers had described the scene, and the broad
outlines of the picture were naturally common property; yet it is to
these more or less conventional traits that attention has often been
too exclusively devoted. Jesus, however, altered the whole character
of the Judgement Day scene by his account of the principles on which
the Judge decides the cases brought before him. On the right hand of
the Judge are--not the J