facts leads to one end only.  We admit it ourselves.  There are those who scold Bunyan for sending Ignorance to hell, but we omit to ask where else could Ignorance go, whether Bunyan sent him or not.  Ignorance, as to germs or precipices or what not, leads to destruction “in pari materia”; in the moral sphere can it be otherwise?  This serves in some measure to explain why Jesus is so tender to gross and flagrant sinners, a fact which some have noted with surprise.  Surely it is because publican and harlot have fewer illusions; they were left little chance of imagining their lives to be right before God.  What Jesus thought of their hardness and impurity we have seen already, but heedless as they were of God’s requirements of them, they were not guilty of the intricate atheism of the Pharisees.  Further, whether it was in his mind or not, it is also true that the frankly gross temptations do bring a man face to face with his own need of God, as the subtler do not; and so far they make for reality.

The fourth group are those who cannot make up their minds.  “No man, having put his hand to the plough, and looking back, is fit for the Kingdom of God” (Luke 9:62).  The word is an interesting one ("euthetos"), it means “handy” or “easy to place.” (The word is used of the salt not “fit” for land or dunghill (Luke 14:35), and the negative of the inconvenient harbour (Acts 27:12).) This man is not adapted for the Kingdom of God; he is not easy to place there.  Like the man who saved his talent but did not use it (Matt. 25:24), he is not exactly bad; but he is “no good,” as we say.  Jesus conceives of the Kingdom of God as dynamic, not static; state or place, condition or relation, it implies work, as God himself implies work.  He holds that truth is not a curiosity for the cabinet but a tool in the hand; that God’s earnest world is no place for nondescript, and that there is only one region left to which they can drift.  What part or place can there be in the Kingdom of Heaven—­in a kingdom won on Calvary—­for people who cannot be relied on, who cannot decide whether to plough or not to plough, nor, when they have made up their mind, stick to it?  Jesus cannot see. (What a revelation of the force and power of his own character!)

These, then, are the four classes whom Jesus warns, and it is clear from the consideration of them that his view of sin is very different from those current in that day.  Men set sin down as an external thing that drifted on to one like a floating burr—­or like paint, perhaps—­it could be picked off or burnt off.  It was the eating of pork or hare—­something technical or accidental; or it was, many thought, the work of a demon from without, who could be driven out to whence he came.  Love and drunkenness illustrated the thing for them—­a change of personality induced by an exterior force or object, as if the human spirit were a glass or a cup into which anything might be poured, and from which it could be emptied and the vessel itself remain