To love the sinner but to hate the sin, has been preached to us : that we should hate nothing but sin has been dinned into our ears. Sin, sin,—what do we know of sin that we should hate it? We cannot hate what we do not know—and to know sin, is that desirable? I say, he who knows no sin hates no sin. Sin is a myth—you may as well hate Mars or Hercules. You know about them ; but is there in your bosom one kindling emotion of love or hatred for them? No ! Why? They were myths, and you know it. Now listen : the only way that you can know sin in others more than you can know Mars or Hercules, is that you fraternize with it, you respond to it as a body resounds when its key-note is struck, or you antagonize against it with quick recoil. In either case you recognize it ; it is struck into tangible proportions for you, it looms before you massive, real. Nothing but the white lightning of God can smite it with its native nothingness. Now, what will you do? That is the resurrection when love rises white and shining from the tomb of mortal thought, reflecting only those things that are "true and lovely and of good report." Christ is not risen for us," said Dr. Bartol once, in an Easter sermon, "unless we rise with him."
To overcome the world—is not that to overcome in ourselves all tendency to reflect, to recognize, to fraternize with or antagonize against sin, and discord, and petty things ? So we do our part to wipe out the seeming existence of the lie upon earth ; to establish the supremacy of the truth ; to turn back the tide of bitter waters to its empty source ; to reduce the jarring discord to silence ; to earn the blessing, "Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord." " The true Christian," says one, " is he who carries about with him always the idea of Christ." To meet scorn with scorn this we scorn, though we scorn only the scorn, and not the scorner ; to meet hate with hate, though we hate not the hater, is to help to confirm on earth the kingdom of the devil, the lie—and not the kingdom of God. Is there then no condition in which we may meet sin with loathing and abhorrence ? Yes ! one. When we are the sinners. We have sinned, and it is our punishment that we should emerge from that sin through the gateway of bitter recoil from it, and of self-condemnation.
Theodore Parker prayed : "Oh God, send us suffering for our sins." It would be degradation indeed to sin and not to suffer—it would be deeper degradation not to even miss the suffering. It is one punishment that that lie that we have made to ourselves real should show real as opposed to the truth of God : that we should seem to stand between, in "the great gulf fixed," looking at the one with shuddering, at the other with eyes of longing that we dare not lift.
