The greater the love, the greater must be the sacrifice. The Father who loves all his children must bear the sins and sorrows of all upon his suffering heart. And the Son who reveals the Father, all sons who share his nature and receive his Spirit, must suffer in exact proportion to the degree in which they enter into the Father's purpose and do his loving will.

To bring this out, however, requires a clear view of the origin and nature of sin. And this in turn calls for a thorough analysis of human nature.

Men by nature seek their own selfish good. Their appetites and passions, their ambitions and aspirations, their instincts and impulses, are the conditions of their self-preservation and the perpetuation of the race. As

such, they are innocent and good. No blame attaches to the Creator who gave them to us; nor to ourselves, so long as we act them out in blind response to their immediate suggestions. The perfect picture of this natural innocence we see in normal animals. Their wants, like the means of gratifying them, are immediate and finite. And though there is struggle and strife and war and death when animal wants come into competition, yet there is no deliberate selfishness, and therefore no sin and conscious guilt. The animal, keenly intent upon its own gratification, is incapable of representing to itself the misery it incidentally inflicts on its competitor and victim. We indeed can look on the act in a light which makes it seem bad. But

the animal lacks that light, and so escapes the condemnation such light would bring. Now the natural, unenlightened man sins in much the same innocent way that an animal sins. In a rude, primitive society, the robber band seldom stop to think of the hardship they inflict on the poor villagers from whom they wrest their herds and crops. The prostitute falls in the first instance, as a rule, through the tenderest, sweetest, holiest impulse of her sex. The man who patronizes houses of prostitution does not realize that in so doing he is a partner in the most wholesale system of murder and degradation civilized society continues to permit. The saloon keeper is usually a man of genial, kindly heart, utterly oblivious of the domestic misery which is the

counterpart of his easily gotten profits out of weak men's appetites. The promoter of unsound enterprises and the wrecker of sound ones, the manipulator of other people's property intrusted to his official care, scarcely appreciate the widespread want and woe resulting from their unscrupulous transactions. Indeed, these men and women who fall lowest in our moral scale often do so in consequence of an excess of those very traits on which the welfare and perpetuation of the race depends. The saloon keeper has often a great deal more of the milk of human kindness in his heart, and is a much better fellow to spend the long winter evenings with, than the temperance reformer who swears out the warrant against him. The harlot on

the street often retains more of generous womanliness than the querulous, censorious matron in her luxurious drawing-room, robed in outwardly spotless respectability, but inwardly full of vanity and pride and exclusiveness and uncharitableness. The men who drive hard bargains and grind down their employees are often at heart quite as well meaning as the pale, impractical moralists and socialists who rail at them, but have not the energy or enterprise to earn a decent living for their own families. The wild college boy who breaks all rules and regulations, academic, moral, civil, often has in him elements of strength and winsomeness and charm which his irreproachable and studious classmate sadly lacks.