The miracles of Jesus - Classical Christian Literature by Athleo.net

1 86 REPEATED SIN AND
left it a city of marble. If you will make Paris as
sweet below as it is fair above, you will earn for yourself
a greater reputation than that of Augustus."
The great Healer sought not only to reconstruct this
man's outward life, but to send streams of purer
thought and nobler feeling through all its hidden
foundations. Jesus never forgets those secret currents
of vitality, which must be sweetened before human
character can become wholesome and benign. He
does not begin its reconstruction from the top downwards.
Its thoughts and aims, its tempers and
affections, must be cleansed and purified. The hand
that accepts a selfish salvation, the stolid heart that
seeks escape from privation and nothing more, the
soul that shirks its debt of gratitude, the white,
trembling lips which tell of a craven reluctance to
confess—all these things are foul, however fair the
structure which meets the common eye. Channels
for the new tides of moral influence must be opened
amidst the foundation courses of the rehabilitated
life.
II.
The words addressed to the healed man in the
temple show that the guilt of sin culminates
with its repetition.
This is not the view current in the world. Sin, it
is sometimes assumed, passes into the category of a
disease when it
has become an ineradicable habit, and
the transgressor is looked upon as a disagreeable
machine, of which responsibility can scarcely be pre-