being concentrated to duty, to get rid of the idea that to be drunken and to be lustful are true and noble expressions of our abounding human life, to get rid of any idea that sin is aught but imprisonment, is to make those who come after us, and to make ourselves in what of life is left for us, gloriously ambitious for the freedom of purity, for a full entrance into that life over which sin has no dominion.  And yet, at the same time, don’t you see that while sin thus becomes contemptible when we think about the great illustration of the will of God and Jesus Christ, don’t you see how also it puts on a new horror?  That which I thought I was doing in the halls of my imprisonment I have really been doing within the possible world of God in which I might have been free.  The moment I see what life might have been to me, then any sin becomes dreadful to me.  Have you ever thought of how the world has stood in glory and honor before the sinless humanity of Jesus Christ?  If any life could prove, if any argument could show on investigation to-day that Jesus did one sin in all his life, that the perfect liberty which was his perfect purity was not absolutely perfect, do you realize what a horror would seem to fall down from the heavens, what a constraint and burden would be laid upon the lives of men, how the gates of men’s possibilities would seem to close in upon them?  It is because there has been that one life which, because absolutely pure from sin, was absolutely free; it is because man may look up and see in that life the revelation and possibility of his own; it is because that life, echoing the great cry throughout the world that man everywhere is the son of God, offers the same purity—­and so the same freedom—­to all mankind; it is for that reason that a man rejoices to cling to, to believe in, however impure his life is, the perfect purity, the sinlessness of the life of Jesus.  When you sin, my friends, it is a man that sins, and a man is a child of God; and for a child of God to sin is an awful thing, not simply for the stain that he brings into the divine nature that is in him, but for the life from which it shuts him out, for the liberty which he abandons, for the inthrallment which it lays upon the soul.  There is one thing that people say very carelessly that always seems to me to be a dreadful thing for a man to say.  They say it when they talk about their lives to one another, and think about their lives to themselves, and by and by very often say it upon their death-bed with the last gasp, as though their entrance into the eternal world had brought them no deeper enlightenment.  One wonders what is the revelation that comes to them when they stand upon the borders of the other side and are in the full life and eternity of God.  The thing men say is, “I have done the very best I can.”  It is an awful thing for a man to say.  The man never lived, save he who perfected our humanity, who ever did the very best he could.  You dishonor your life, you not simply