The sadness of the world has been,
that men have not always been spiritually free. Freedom has been a
social growth--a phase of progress. It has taken wars and persecutions,
revolutions and reformations, the blood of saints and martyrs, the
sorrow of ages, to plant this precept in the mind of man.
The evangelist warns. He speaks of sin, death, hell, and the judgment
to come. It is for these things that he is sent to testify. These are
not the catch-words of a new sort of Fear King who uses oral terrors to
affright the soul of man. Heaven and hell are not a new sort of
ghost-land: retribution is not a larger way of tribal revenge.
No. The latest facts of science present this universe as not only
progressive, but as retributive. There is a rebound of evil which makes
for pain. Each broken law exacts a penalty. Each deed of sin is a
forerunner of personal and of social disaster. The generation that sins
shall be cut off, while the stock of the righteous grows strong from
age to age.
The scientific vista opening to the eye of man is impressive and
appalling. Each man has within himself a future of joy or sadness for
the race.
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