nsciously fallen short of it, wilfully contradicted it. We cannot
accept the coat of many colors, whatever the flatterers may say; the
sackcloth is ours, and it eats our spirit like fire.

Most fully does Christ recognize the great catastrophe. Some modern
theologians may dismiss sin as "a mysterious incident" in the
development of humanity, as a grain of sand that has unluckily blown
into the eye, as a thorn that has accidentally pierced our heel,
but the greatest of ethical teachers regarded sin as a profound
contradiction of that eternal will which is altogether wise and good.
More than any other teacher Jesus Christ emphasized the actuality and
awfulness of sin; more than any other has He intensified the world's
consciousness of sin. He never attempted to relieve us of the
sackcloth by asserting our comparative innocence; He never attempted
to work into that melancholy robe one thread of color, to relieve it
with one solitary spangle of rhetoric. Sin was the burden of the life
of Christ because it is the burden of our life. Christ has done more
than insisted on the reality, the odiousness, the ominousness, of
sin--He has laid bare its principle and essence. The New Testament
discovers to us the mystery of iniquity as ungodliness; its inmost
essence being unbelief in God's truth, the denial of His justice,
the rejection of His love, the violation of His law. The South Sea
islanders have a singular tradition to account for the existence of
the dew. The legend relates that in the beginning the earth touched
the sky, that being the golden age when all was beautiful and glad;
then some dreadful tragedy occurred, the primal unity was broken up,
the earth and the sky were torn asunder as we see them now, and the
dewdrops of the morning are the tears that nature sheds over the sad
divorce. This wild fable is a metaphor of the truth; the beginning of
all evil lies in the alienation of the spirit of man from God, in the
divorce of earth from heaven; here is the final reason why the face
of humanity is wet with tears. How vividly Christ taught that all our
fear and we arise out of this false relation of our spirit to the
living God! Above and beyond all, Christ recognizes the sackcloth that
He may take it away. In the anguish of his soul Job cried, "I
have sinned; what shall I do unto thee, O thou Preserver of men?"
Christianity is God's full and final answer to that appeal. In Christ
we have the revelation of God's ceaseless,