lties they have
abused--the talent is taken away (Matt. 25:28); "from him that hath
not, shall be taken away even that which he hath" (Matt. 25:29). The
nature is changed as memory is changed, and the "overflow of the
heart" in speech and act bears witness to it. The faculty of choice
is weakened; the interval in which inhibition--to use our modern
term--is possible, grows shorter. The instincts are perverted and
the whole being is disorganized. In a word, all that Jesus connotes
by "the Kingdom of God" is "taken from them" (Matt. 21:43), and
nothing left but "outer darkness" (Matt. 22:13). The vision of God
is not for the impure (Matt. 5:8). Meanwhile sin is not a sterile
thing, it is a leaven (Matt. 16:6). If our modern medical language
may be applied--and Jesus used the analogy of medicine in this very
case (Mark 2:17)--sin is septic. In the first place, all sin is
anti-social--an invasion "ipso facto" of the rights of others. The
man who sins either takes away what is another's--a man's goods, a
widow's house, or a woman's purity--or he fails to give to others
what is their due, be it, in the obvious field, the aid the Good
Samaritan rendered to the wounded and robbed man by the roadside
(Luke 10:33), or, in the higher sphere, truth, sympathy, help in the
maintenance of principle, or in the achievement of progress and
development (cf. Matt. 25:43). Sin is the repudiation of the
concepts of law, duty, and service, in a word, of the love on God's
scale which God calls men to exercise. And its fruits are, above
all, its dissemination. Injustice, a historian has said, always
repays itself with frightful compound interest. If a man starts to
debauch society, his example is quickly followed; and it comes to
hatred.

What, we asked, did Jesus mean by "lost"? This, above all, that sin
cuts a man adrift from God. In the parable of the Prodigal Son this
is brought out (Luke 15:11-32). There the youth took from his father
all he could get, and then deliberately turned his back on him
forever; he went into a far country, out of his reach, outside his
influence, and beyond the range of his ideas, and he devoted his
father's gifts to precisely what would sadden and trouble his father
most. And then came bankruptcy, final and hopeless. There was no
father available in the far country; he had to live without him, and
it came to a life that was not even human--a life of solitude, a
life of beasts. Jesus draws it, as he does most t