armed with nothing but their battle-axes, hurled themselves in vain all
day long against the serried ranks of Austrian mail-clad warriors,
armed with spears, through which the shepherd men could make no way.
They fell before them, but could not pass through them, till Winkelried
called to his countrymen, "Provide for my wife and children and I will
make a way," and, rushing unarmed upon the spearmen of Austria, clasped
in his embrace as many of them as he could and bore them to the earth.
A dozen spears passed through his body, but through the gap his
devotion had made, his countrymen leaped to victory. That one act made
possible, humanly speaking, the Swiss independence, which is an
object-lesson for us to-day. Such acts as these form part of the
cherished lore of nations. We feel they are the light-centres of the
world. Something tells us that an act like that, the giving of a life
for the sake of an ideal, a cause, a country, was a great thing. It
represented the counter tendency to what was going on at that moment.
In that very battle Austria was trying to grasp and hold, Switzerland
was trying to get free and live her own life, and here was a man who,
for the sake of his country's ideal, gave all that he had--his life.
Will you tell me where to look for the focus and centre of that ideal?
I know what your answer would be. It was at Calvary. The one thing
which, consciously or subconsciously, men have recognised in Jesus that
has given Him His supreme attraction for the world, is this--He was
absolutely disinterested. It is the disinterestedness of Jesus, His
utter nobleness, His power of projecting Himself into the experience of
others, and trying to lift humanity as a whole to His experience of
God, that gave Him His power with mankind. Jesus not only proclaimed,
but lived, the counter tendency to the law of sin and death.

Now, when we have brought the two together, you see the essential
distinction between working for self and its deathward look, and
working for all with its lifeward gaze. These two are antithetic, and
must be in opposition until the latter absorbs the former, and God is
all in all, and love reigneth world without end.

We are now able to see what sin is more plainly than before. Sin is
the tendency to grasp and draw inward, and everything that feeds that
tendency makes for death. Sin is the expansion of the individuality at
the expense of the race; sin is acting on the belief that