commissions of our selfish everyday life. Just look at the case for a moment. Ask yourself what you have ever done that you know and feel to be wrong; ask yourself why it was wrong, and you will soon see that it was because you have caused pain or loss to some individual, or some circle of human beings, or humanity as a whole. If, for example, you have become the victim of an evil habit, you are not only injuring yourself, but causing sorrow and hardship to those who love you. Moreover, instead of fulfilling your vocation in blessing and helping humanity, you may be a curse to it; you are doing harm not only by the evil you have wrought, but by the good you have failed to perform. If you are a bad husband and father, your life is casting a blight over your wife and children, for no life can be isolated or lived to itself alone. It only requires a little reflection in order to see this. There is not a single human action, not a single human thought, which can properly be called sinful which is not a wrong done to humanity. You cannot sin against God without sinning against man. Any evil done to yourself or to any other individual is an evil done to the whole race. It is no use trying to separate between God and man when considering this question. All sin may rightly be thought of as iniquity that is in-equity or injustice - between the individual and the race or between man and man. I want you hard-headed Englishmen to go home and think this out, and then see whether it is

enough to come to church and confess sin as though it had nothing to do with the effect of your life upon human happiness. The world is suffering to-day because we are trying to score off one another instead of helping one another, trying to grab and keep the good things of earth for ourselves instead of making them a means of blessing to our kind. We are jealous of one another; cruel, censorious, afraid of trusting one another; crafty, insincere, intent upon gaining by one another's loss. Imagine the world purged of iniquity-in-equity and it would be heaven. There is hardly a single thing I could mention as being a cause of sadness or uneasiness to those who are now listening to me which is not traceable in some way to human selfishness, and human selfishness is bound to show itself in action as iniquity.

Suppose you were to test your lives in this way. Suppose instead of saying, "I repent of all my sin against God," you omit the general statement for a while and say: "I repent of having shares in a business which is dealing unjustly with those it employs; I repent of trying to entrap my neighbour into a deal which would have been a gain to me and a loss to him; I repent of having been a bully to those in my power; I repent of being hard upon the weak when I might have been helpful and considerate; I repent of making home miserable by showing my worst side there and my best out of doors; I repent of having considered my own ease and comfort

when I had the opportunity of lifting burdens from weary backs; I repent of being contented with my own lot when there were wrongs to be righted and griefs to be comforted all around me; I repent of refusing to respond to God's call to be a helper in work that lay near to my hand." I think if sin were confessed in this way for a while the world might get on faster. All such things as these are iniquities, and sin against God is iniquity against man.

This brings me straight to Jesus. Why is Jesus the Saviour and Redeemer of the world? It is because He saw so plainly that what the world was suffering from was lack of love. Iniquity is only the refusal to obey the law of love. If men's hearts were filled with love the world would be filled with joy. Jesus not only saw this but lived it, and to do so in the presence of the blind selfishness of humanity caused Him untold suffering, and finally brought Him to a violent death. The greatest iniquity the world has ever perpetrated was the killing of the Prince of life. No sooner was it done than some of those who had known and loved Jesus began to see what it was that had given Him such power over their hearts. They found too that He was alive and helping and supporting them in their endeavour to live the life of love which He had lived. This discovery came to them as a kind of emancipation, a wonderful spiritual uplift setting them free from their former worldly feelings and desires. They found that this new life was a life

of far greater happiness than the old life of petty struggles and ambitions had ever been. They just yielded themselves up to the spirit of Jesus, which to them was the spirit of love, and they found that it transformed their whole world.

It is doing so to-day. Faith in Jesus is faith in Divine love, and that is the one thing needed to turn men away from their iniquities. So long as men go on fighting one another, and trying to get the better of one another, so long will the world be dark and wretched. But so soon as men become willing to take up the Cross in their desire to serve and help one another, they will learn that there is nothing in the wide universe so strong as love. It is all so simple and yet so sweetly true. You can soon prove it for yourself if you like to try. If you will just give yourself up to the service of this dear Redeemer of mankind, if you will let His spirit possess you wholly, you will never need to fear again. There is a wonderful rapture in being delivered from selfservice, self-pity, self-regard. To be filled with Divine love is to be filled with joy and power. There is a glorious exhilaration in being alive when you know that you are the servant of God to one great end, namely, filling the whole earth with the sweetness of Divine compassion and making it a kingdom of love.

THE CLEANSING LIFE

"If we walk in the light, as He is in the light, we have fellowship one with another, and the blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanseth us from all sin." I JOHN i. 7.

It is somewhat remarkable that the latter part of our text should be so frequently quoted apart from the former, and yet, as can easily be seen from a scrutiny of the whole passage in which it appears, the writer never meant that the two should be considered independently. The latter part of the text, indeed, is immediately dependent upon the former. When this fact is taken into account the effect is rather striking. According to the writer of this epistle, "the blood of Jesus Christ cleanseth us from all sin" if we walk in the light. This is hardly the way in which we are usually accustomed to hear the matter stated. It is far more commonly put thus: The blood of Jesus Christ will cleanse you from all your sins if you will only accept by faith the benefits of His atoning work. But acceptance on faith and walking in the light are surely not quite the same thing. There must be some ratio between the two, but walking in the light does not imply a completed action; rather it implies something which is continually going on. Let us look into this question, for it is a highly important one.