The Mystery of Iniquity: and Other Sermons

In this season of Lent, the one thought which we want to bring and keep before ourselves is the thought of our own sinfulness. These weeks are set apart for the very purpose that we may make familiar to ourselves the idea of human sin, its sources, its nature, its effects, its remedy. We turn that idea over and over, look at it on this side and on that, try to know it by every point of access, try to let it completely get possession and control of us. And thus there are many subjects which are proper to be treated the extent of human sin, its enormity, its variety, its tenacity, its sorrow, its penalty, the ingratitude of man in committing it, and the great love of God in pardoning it-all these are fit and familiar topics for Lenten consideration.

In our text Paul suggests another, — not less fit, though perhaps not so familiar, "The Mystery of Iniquity," the mysterious character of human sin. Let us try to turn one or two of the many sides of this subject into view to-day and see if we cannot get some idea of it.

What does he mean, then, by the mystery of sin? Is not sin the one great present palpable thing which everybody understands by the clear witness of his own experience? But remember what a mystery is. A mystery I take to be the general name for any event whose reality or fact is evident, but whose method or way of accomplishment it is not in our power to understand. Thus, for instance, we call the force of gravitation a mysterious power. Every falling apple, every steady mountain, bears witness that such a force really exists; but what it is, how it works, where its causes and conditions lie, who can tell? So we talk about the mystery of life. Life is self-conscious. It testifies itself in every living action. The fact of life runs in the blood, beats in the pulse, speaks in the voice, thinks in the brain. But the mystery lies deeper, in the unfound methods, in that long-sought something which neither physician nor metaphysician has yet tracked to its hiding-place, that unnamed essence in which the true cause of life resides. And yet again of God we speak of Him as the great all-embracing Mystery. You see again, it is not the fact but the method of His existence that is mysterious. We know that He is Creation, Providence; the Human Consciousness, the Divine Revelation, all tell us that. How He is; what is meant by eternal and uncaused existence; how the sacred union of the three persons is bound into the single life of Deity; what it is to be omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, these are the things we do not know. It is our ignorance of these that makes God a mystery to us. Shall we take yet

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