“To whom ye present yourselves as servants unto obedience, his servants—­his slaves—­ye are whom ye obey; whether of sin unto death, or of obedience unto righteousness.”  Apostle and Lord mean the same thing, true of us as it was true of the Jews:  “Every one that committeth sin is the slave of sin.” (b) Further, Christ says, men are in debt through their sin.  In one parable He tells us of a certain lender who had two debtors; the one owed five hundred pence, and the other fifty; but neither had wherewith to pay.  In another parable we hear of a servant who owed his lord ten thousand talents—­a gigantic sum, vague in its vastness, “millions” as we might say—­and he likewise had not wherewith to pay.  Further, in the application of each parable, it is God to whom this unpayable debt is due.  Now, it is just at this point that our sense of sin to-day is weakest.  The scientist, the dramatist, the novelist are all proclaiming our responsibility toward them that come after us; with pitiless insistence they are telling us that the evil that men do lives after them, that it is not done with when it is done.  Yet, with all this, there may be no thought of God.  It is the consciousness not merely of responsibility, but of responsibility God-ward, which needs to be strengthened.  When we sin we may wrong others much, we may wrong ourselves more, but we wrong God most of all; and we shall never recover Christ’s thought of sin until, like the psalmist and the prodigal, we have learned to cry to Him, “Against Thee have I sinned, and done that which is evil in Thy sight.”

(3) But sin, in Christ’s view of it, is not merely something a man does, it is what he is.  Go through Paul’s long and dismal catalogue of “the works of the flesh”:  “Fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousies, wraths, factions, divisions, heresies, envyings, drunkenness, revellings, and such like.”  Yet even this is not the whole of the matter.  Sin is more than the sum-total of man’s sins.  The fruits are corrupt because the tree which yields them is corrupt; the stream is tainted because the fountain whence it flows is impure; man commits sin because he is sinful.  It was just here that Christ broke, and broke decisively, with the traditional religion of His time.  To the average Jew of that day righteousness and sin meant nothing more than the observance or the non-observance of certain religious traditions.  “For the Pharisees, and all the Jews, except they wash their hands diligently, eat not, holding the tradition of the elders:  and when they come from the market-place, except they wash themselves, they eat not; and many other things there be which they have received to hold, washings of cups, and pots, and brazen vessels.”  “Nay,” said Jesus, “you are beginning at the wrong end, you are concerned about the wrong things, for from within, out of the heart of men, evil thoughts proceed, fornications, thefts, murders, adulteries, covetings, wickedness, deceit, lasciviousness, an evil eye, railing, pride, foolishness:  all these evil things proceed from within.”  Deep in the heart of man evil has its seat, and until that is touched nothing is done.