sh man or woman's sin finds
them out, they say that there is an ounce of the golden calf on it. They
open their Exodus and they read there in their bitterness of how Moses in
his hot anger took the calf, which the children of Israel had polluted
themselves with, and burned it in the fire, and ground it to powder, and
strewed it upon the water, and made the children of Israel to drink of
it. And, though God turned the poisoned, dust-laden waters of Samuel
Rutherford's life into very milk and wine, yet to Rutherford's subtle and
detective taste there was always a certain tang of the unclean and
accursed thing in it. The best waled and most tenderly substituted cross
in Rutherford's chastised life had always a certain galling corner in it
that recalled to him, as he bled inwardly under it, the lack of complete
purity and strict regularity in his youth. And it is to be feared that
there are but too few men or women either who have not some Rutherford-
like memory behind them that still clouds their now sheltered life and
secretly poisons their good conscience. Some disingenuity, some
simulation or dissimulation of affection, some downright or constructive
dishonesty, some lack towards some one of open and entire integrity, some
breach of good faith in spirit if not in letter, some still stinging
tresspass of the golden rule, some horn or hoof of the golden calf, the
bitter dust of which they taste to this day in their sweetest cup and at
their most grace-spread table. There are more men and women in the
Church of Christ than any one would believe who sing with a broken heart
at every communion table: 'He hath not dealt with us after our sins, nor
rewarded us according to our iniquities. As far as the east is from the
west, so far hath He removed our transgressions from us.'

And even after such men and women might have learned a lesson, how soon
we see all that lesson forgotten. Even after God's own hand has so
conspicuously cut the bars of iron in sunder; after He has made the
solitary to dwell in families; we still see sin continuing in new shapes
and in other forms to poison the sweetest things in human life. What
selfishness we see in family life, and that, too, after the vow and the
intention of what self-suppression and self-denial. What impatience with
one another, what bad temper, what cruel and cutting words, what coldness
and rudeness and neglect, in how many ways our abiding sinfulness
continues to poiso