cries, 'what shall I do? If I bathe myself
in snow water and wash my hands never so clean, yet shalt Thou plunge me
in the ditch and mine own clothes shall abhor me!' Every day of his life
he thought he heard, morning and noon and night, the awful Voice of the
Most High. 'Though thou wash thee with niter, and take thee much soap,
yet thine iniquity is marked before Me, saith the Lord God.' He felt as
Macbeth felt when advised to cleanse the stain from his guilty hands.

Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood
Clean from my hand! No, this my hand will rather
The multitudinous seas incarnadine,
Making the green one red!

Job was like the old lama, in Rudyard Kipling's _Kim_, who, year after
year, wandered through cities and rice-fields, over the hills and across
the plains, always searching, but searching in vain, for the River, the
River of the Arrow, the River that could cleanse from sin!

John, on the other hand, thought of sin as a _condemning_ thing. The
great word 'condemnation' occurs on almost every page of his writings.
He feels that every man's sin carries its own conviction. It is like
finger-print evidence; it speaks for itself; it needs no long procession
of corroborating witnesses. There it is! It tells its own terrible tale,
and there is no gainsaying it.

IV

And yet, looked at in another way, the thoughts of these two men stand
in sharp and striking contrast, the one with the other. '_I have
sinned_,' cried Job; '_what shall I do? What shall I do?_'

But there is no reply. In the course of the stupendous drama that bears
his name, Job scours sea and land, earth and sky, for some answer to the
wild questionings of his soul. He climbs the summits of the loftiest
mountains and thrids the labyrinth of the deepest mine; he calls to the
heights of the heavens and to the depths of the sea. But there is no
answering voice, and he is left to nurse his dumb and piteous despair.
Every attempt that he makes to rid his soul of its defilement is like
the effort of a man who, in trying to remove the stain from his window,
rubs on the wrong side of the glass.

But, in contrast with all this, John saw the Cross! How could he ever
forget it? Had he not stood beside it, gazed into the thorn-crowned
face, and received from those quivering lips their last sacred
bequest--the charge of the Saviour's mother? And, all through the
eventful years that followed, John never tired of presenting the Cross
as