Bitter experience teaches that the imprisoning net clings too tightly to be stripped from our limbs by our own efforts. Nay rather, the net and the captive are one, and he who tries to cast off the oppression which hinders him from following that which is good is trying to cast off himself. The desperate problem that fronts every effort at self-emendation has two bristling impossibilities in it: one, how to annihilate the past; one, how to extirpate the evil that is part of my very self, and yet to keep the self entire. The very terms of the problem show it to be insoluble, and the climax of allhonest efforts at making a clean thing of an unclean by means within reach of the unclean thing itself, is the despairing cry, O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me out of the body of this death?'
But to men writhing in the grip of a sinful past, or paralysed beyond writhing, and indifferent, because hopeless, or because they have come to like their captivity, comes one whose name is the Breaker,' whose mission it is to proclaim liberty to the captives, and whose hand laid on the cords that bind a soul, causes them to drop harmless from the limbs and sets the bondsman free. Many tongues praise Jesus for many great gifts, but His proper work, and that peculiar to Himself alone, is His work on the sin and the sins of the world. He deals with that which no man can deal with for himself or by his own power. He can cancel our past, so that it shall not govern our future. He can give new power to light the old habits. He can give a new life which owes nothing to the former self, and is free from taint from it. He can break the entail of sin, the law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus' can make any of us, even him who is most tied and bound by the chain of his sins, free from the law of sin and death.' We cannot break the chains that fetter us, and our own struggles, like the plungings of a wild beast caught in the toils, but draw the bonds tighter. But the chains that cannot be broken can be melted, and it may befall each of us as it befell the three Hebrews in the furnace, when the king was astonished' and asked, Did not we east three men bound into the midst of the fire?' and wonderingly declared, Lo, I see four men loose walking in the midst of the fire, and the aspect of the fourth is like a son of the gods.'
