We cannot
accept the coat of many colors, whatever the flatterers may say; the
sackcloth is ours, and it eats our spirit like fire.
Most fully does Christ recognize the great catastrophe. Some modern
theologians may dismiss sin as "a mysterious incident" in the
development of humanity, as a grain of sand that has unluckily blown
into the eye, as a thorn that has accidentally pierced our heel,
but the greatest of ethical teachers regarded sin as a profound
contradiction of that eternal will which is altogether wise and good.
More than any other teacher Jesus Christ emphasized the actuality and
awfulness of sin; more than any other has He intensified the world's
consciousness of sin. He never attempted to relieve us of the
sackcloth by asserting our comparative innocence; He never attempted
to work into that melancholy robe one thread of color, to relieve it
with one solitary spangle of rhetoric. Sin was the burden of the life
of Christ because it is the burden of our life. Christ has done more
than insisted on the reality, the odiousness, the ominousness, of
sin--He has laid bare its principle and essence.
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