arefully arranged within glass cases, and everything is duly
classified and labelled. Rather it is like nature itself, where the
flowers grow wild at our feet, and the rocks lie as the Creator's hand
left them, and where each man must do the classifying and labelling for
himself. Museums have their uses, and there will always be those who
prefer them--they save so much trouble. But since Christ's aim was not
to save us trouble, but to teach us to see things with our own eyes, to
see them as He saw them, and to think of them as He thinks, it is no
wonder that He has chosen rather to put us down in the midst of a world
of living truths than in a museum of assorted and dead facts.

I

What, then, is the teaching of Jesus concerning sin? His tone is at once
severe and hopeful. Sometimes His words are words that shake our hearts
with fear; sometimes they surprise us with their overflowing tenderness
and pity. But however He may deal with the sinner, we are always made to
feel that to Jesus sin is a serious thing, a problem not to be slurred
over and made light of, but to be faced, and met, and grappled with.
Christ's sense of the gravity of sin comes out in many ways.

(1) It is involved in His doctrine of man. He who made so much of man
could not make light of man's sin. It is because man is so great that
his sin is so grave. No one can understand the New Testament doctrine of
sin who does not read it in the light of the New Testament doctrine of
man. When we think of man as Christ thought of him, when we see in him
the possibilities which Christ saw, the Scripture language concerning
sin becomes intelligible enough; until then it may easily seem
exaggerated and unreal. It is the height for which man was made and
meant which measures the fall which is involved in his sin.

(2) Call to mind the language in which Christ set forth the effects of
sin. He spoke of men as blind, as sick, as dead; He said they were as
sheep gone astray, as sons that are lost, as men in debt which they can
never pay, in bondage from which they can never free themselves. The
very accumulation of metaphors bears witness to Christ's sense of the
havoc wrought by sin. Nor are they metaphors merely; they are His
reading of the facts of life as it lay before Him. Let me refer briefly
to two of them, (_a_) Christ spoke of men as in bondage through their
sin. "If," He said once, "ye abide in My word ... ye shall know the
truth, and the truth shall m