e God
saw Himself in us. It was this God-self in us that was lost to us.
Not knowing it to be the hidden root of our true life, we did not
claim our dignity, nor walk as became the sons of God. A man who
lost the sense of his freedom, though free, would be fettered
still. A man whose sense of beauty was lost would be as in a
desert in the paradise of God. A lost sense of freedom meant a
slavish mind, and a lost sense of beauty meant a prosaic mind, no
matter how free the man, nor how beautiful his environment. So men
had lost the sense of their sonship. They did not know their royal
descent, their kinship with the Father, and therefore they did not
act as became sons. A lost sense of relationship begat in them
disobedience and alienation. They possessed gold, but were content
with brass; and instead of iron they built with clay. The eternal
and abiding was in them, but _lost_ to them, covered with
incrustations of self and buried deep beneath the lesser and the
meaner man. There were times in a man's life when the better
nature gave hints of its existence. The mission of Christ was to
awaken these hints. He came to tell them they were men, that they
were souls, that they were sons and not servants, friends and not
enemies of God. When He stirred these powers in men He stirred the
lost. He set it before the eye of man, and made man see what he
had within him, what he was _really_, and at the _root_ of his
being--a man, a Son of Man, a Child of God. How hard this was only
Christ knew. Spiritually, men put themselves, through spiritual
ignorance, in false relations. This wrong relationship lay at the
root of all disorder. It was the secret of discomfiture, misery
and sin. Men were not lost in badness, not lost in sin, but lost
to that which when discovered to them made their badness
unbearable--in other words, "took away their sin." Lost souls,
damned souls, souls in hell--as the theologians termed them--were
simply souls lost to their right relationship. And the work of
Christ was to find _in_ men, and find out _for_ men, what this
right relationship was. This was what was meant in the text, the
Son of Man came to seek and to save that which was lost. Their
friend Moses Fletcher had found something in himself. He had found
love, and courage, and a sense of goodness. These had been
discovered to him by the One who was always revealing the good in
us if we would but let Him, and if we would but open our eyes to
see. He, M